by Ron McLinden
You wouldn’t expect an elegant but modest 52-year-old suspension bridge over the Missouri River at Kansas City to set the stage for a major realignment of how Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) thinks about highways, but it just might happen.
At issue is a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for rebuilding a three-mile segment of I-29 and I-35 (including the Paseo Bridge) between Kansas City’s downtown highway loop and Armour Road in North Kansas City, just across the river. The comment period for the DEIS ended May 22.
Normally a comment period is a formality. State and federal resource agencies point out how the DEIS does or does not meet the requirements of this or that law, and a few environmental and neighborhood groups have their say. Normally MoDOT tweaks the document and then the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) approves it in a “record of decision” (ROD), which thereafter serves as evidence that MoDOT has done due diligence with respect to protecting endangered critters and steering clear of contaminated sites.
Not so this time around. For a variety of reasons, this DEIS has attracted the attention of many public officials and major civic constituencies. The final outcome could be highly significant.
The Paseo Bridge, part of the “North Midtown Expressway,” was constructed in 1954 as a toll facility, part of a regional highway network envisioned by Kansas City in a plan published in the late 1940’s. Following Congressional authorization of the interstate highway system in 1956, the bridge was designated to carry I-29 and I-35 across the Missouri River.
A half century of development in Clay and Platte Counties—Kansas City’s “Northland”—resulted in the roadway carrying a heavy load of commuter and other vehicular traffic. Moreover, time (and changing highway design standards) led to a perceived need to either rebuild or replace the bridge. That need was underscored in 2003 when a structural failure forced MoDOT to close the bridge for several weeks for emergency repairs. MoDOT subsequently did a substantial rehab of the bridge in 2005, resulting in a fifteen-year extension of the bridge’s useful life.
Meanwhile, local civic support has been building for a replacement bridge that would be unique in character—a so-called “signature” or “iconic” bridge. Kansas City leaders have looked with envy on the distinctive new Mississippi River bridges at West Alton and Cape Girardeau, and at renderings for a new I-70 bridge at St. Louis, noting that MoDOT has built only the plainest of bridges in the Kansas City area.
Civic interest (and boosterism) laid the groundwork for the “Northland-Downtown Major Investment Study” (MIS) that explored transportation options between 1998 and 2002. That study was multi-modal in nature, and the Sierra Club participated in its stakeholder meetings. The MIS identified a route for light rail to serve the Northland, and concluded that additional vehicular capacity should be added in the Paseo Bridge corridor. After an overly ambitious light rail plan was defeated by Kansas City voters in 2003, MoDOT proceeded with plans to widen the highway.
Voter approval of Amendment 3 in 2004 gave MoDOT enough money to finance a number of major projects using bonds. The Paseo Bridge came out on top in a statewide priority-setting process and was allocated $195 million. Senator Kit Bond subsequently got a Congressional earmark for an additional $50 million.
Long story short, MoDOT now has $245 million to build a project, and has promised to complete it by October 31, 2011. To accomplish that feat, they’ve decided to use a procedure still new to Missouri—“design-build.” (MoDOT has initiated one previous design-build project—a twelve-mile stretch of U.S. 40/I-64 in St. Louis—at a cost of $535 million. That project is off to a slow start, in part due to questions about whether the highway will be closed entirely during reconstruction.)
Normally, MoDOT would design a project and then ask contractors to bid on it. Under design-build, MoDOT develops the project concept and invites contractor teams to bid on doing both the final design work and the construction. Theoretically, the project gets done faster since construction can begin before all design details are worked out. What’s more, the project could end up being better since the design-build team presumably knows better how to design projects to be cost-effective.
The Paseo Bridge project would be MoDOT’s second experience with design-build. But the complexity of the project and range of unresolved issues is causing MoDOT no end of problems. In fact, MoDOT has probably already lost some of the good will it has enjoyed in Kansas City and could lose a good deal of credibility statewide in the process.
But back to the DEIS. In order to provide maximum flexibility for a design-build team to perform its cost-effective magic, MoDOT’s DEIS was written to cover the biggest project they could envision: an eight-lane highway with a ten-lane bridge.
Trouble is, that left too many details unanswered. MoDOT promised to form a Community Advisory Group to help resolve the details, but that has raised concerns that the group will have little say.
Enter some usually silent governmental and civic entities:
Mid-America Regional Council filed comments outlining concerns that the DEIS doesn’t address the full range of transportation needs and options, and that it gives too little consideration to important aspects of the region’s adopted long-range transportation plan.
The Kansas City Bicycle Federation, concerned that the DEIS is vague about the where-when-how of the region’s first safe river crossing for cyclists and pedestrians, has been vocal in the process. They want any new Paseo Bridge to accommodate bikes and pedestrians—and they’d like accommodations for bikes and pedestrians added to the existing Heart of America Bridge as well.
The Columbus Park neighborhood, a traditionally Italian community just north of downtown that has more recently welcomed immigrants from many nations and is undergoing strong revitalization, has been especially vocal. Neighborhoods had little say back in the 1950s, but the community is making up for it this time around. Legal action is a possibility.
An informal alliance of downtown and transit interests—the Downtown Council, Regional Transit Alliance, Kansas City Design Center, and the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects—also filed extensive comments. Drawing on an analysis by a Florida transportation consulting firm, they point out the failure of the DEIS to adequately consider all possible transportation alternatives; the heavy bias in the language of the DEIS in favor of expanded highway capacity; inadequate consideration of detrimental effects an expanded highway might have on a revitalizing downtown and other nearby communities; and the disproportionate benefit the project would give to more affluent and “lighter-skinned” people at the expense of less affluent and “darker-skinned” people. They also insist that transit and bike/ped improvements be included in the project.
A technical analysis attached to the alliance’s comment (see link on the Thomas Hart Benton (THB) Group of the Sierra Club website, http://missouri.sierraclub.org/thb) is especially valuable for its exposition on the DEIS’s use of biased language. The DEIS, it’s alleged, reflects a bias that favors higher-speed highway travel, rather than a more holistic approach to transportation that includes better land use planning and consideration of future natural resource constraints—including peak oil.
The analysis also touches on the sensitive issue of how a half century of urban highway construction has generally benefited whites over minorities. Such ”environmental justice” issues weren’t a consideration in the 1950s, but President Clinton’s Executive Order 12898 of February, 1994, makes “EJ” an issue today.
The Sierra Club also submitted comments on the DEIS—they can be found on the THB Group website. Because other organizations addressed local issues so well, we focused on broad issues like mode choice and regional growth patterns—pointing out indirectly that the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC, the metropolitan planning organization for the bi-state Kansas City region) has still not done an adequate job of articulating a long-range development vision for the region that considers long-term energy supply and cost.
At this writing it’s hard to predict the final outcome. Nevertheless, one can speculate:
u Due to concerns about inadequate consideration of transit and bike/ped issues—as well as the extensive issues raised in the Columbus Park comment—it’s likely that this DEIS will get a major overhaul.
- Due to the attention focused on language bias, it’s likely MoDOT will take care that future studies are more objective.
- Due to uncertainty about the nature of the project to be built and the possibility of procedural challenges, MoDOT may have trouble getting qualified design-build teams to bid. And even if there are bidders, MoDOT could miss its promised 2011 delivery date.
- If there’s much additional controversy, MoDOT’s credibility could take a major hit, jeopardizing the agency’s hopes for taking a major tax increase to the voters in 2008 or 2009.
- Of particular interest in the Kansas City area, an environmental study currently underway for a segment of I-70 between downtown and I-470, some 15 miles to the east, is likely to give significantly more attention to environmental justice issues. Nearby neighborhoods are likely to become more involved as they see what Columbus Park is able to accomplish.
- Over and above MARC’s demonstrated interest in the DEIS, several factors lay important groundwork for regional progress on sprawl. Technical comments that mention regional development patterns and resource factors in transportation planning reinforce our own comments, thereby serving to remind MARC that, even after 16 years of our prodding, it has still not done a “policy forecast” of regional development and travel demand.
Those factors, added to growing awareness of global warming and our over-reliance on oil, lead to the possibility that the region might finally have the “excuse” it needs to look at its future in a more holistic way.
Let’s hope so.