Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 13, 1994 TAG: 9403130054
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
The six-term Democrat from Abingdon promised to make his pitch before the board's meeting Thursday. Boucher wants the state to delay its decision on a corridor and conduct a more thorough economic-impact study.
Boucher's pledge came a day after state Del. Jim Shuler, D-Blacksburg, also called on the board to delay any routing decision "until there has been an opportunity for all citizens to be heard."
Boucher spoke to a packed crowd in the Blacksburg Town Council chambers and took nearly two hours of questions. It was to have been one of his regular "town meetings" on federal issues ranging from health-care reform to new telecommunications law.
But most of the more than 120 people gathered had one topic in mind: I-73 and its impact on Montgomery and Giles counties.
Many speakers decried what they described as a lack of public involvement allowed by the state and tried to get Boucher to commit to opposing the project altogether.
The state study panned Alternative 6, which would have passed through the Catawba Valley, but placed its companion, Alternative 6A, second overall and first in economic impact. The latter route would enter Giles County at Narrows, follow U.S. 460 to Blacksburg, then follow the path of the proposed "smart road" toward the Roanoke area and U.S. 220, where it would head south toward Martinsville and Winston-Salem, N.C.
Calling the state study flawed and "rather juvenile" in its approach to assessing economic impact, Boucher said a route through the New River and Roanoke valleys would have the least amount of benefit compared with one passing through an area that lacks an interstate highway.
"I don't think they asked the right economic questions with regard to these various routes," he said. "My problem is I still don't know what to recommend in the alternative."
Boucher said that six months ago he urged state transportation planners to widen the number of potential corridors through Southwest Virginia for the Michigan-to-South Carolina interstate.
But routes through Wise and Scott counties in the coalfields and through Grayson, Smyth and Tazewell counties slightly more to the east all rounded out the bottom of the highway planners' overall ranking of the 12 variations on the seven possible Virginia routes. Passing through Floyd County on Virginia 8, another area that lacks interstate access, placed in the middle.
State planners said last week they didn't have time to go beyond an estimate of the number of hotel, restaurant and gas station jobs that would be created by new interstate interchanges.
Asked what opponents to I-73 should do, Boucher told the crowd to write or fax the governor and representatives on the Transportation Board. "The thing to do is to say there has not been time for adequate public comment," he said. "A glance westward from Montgomery County would make a lot more sense."
by CNB