ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, July 11, 1996 TAG: 9607110078
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: FREDERICKSBURG
SOURCE: Associated Press
STATE PLANNERS noted in a newsletter a way of skirting a historic battlefield. But Northern Virginia residents are upset it hadn't been suggested earlier.
The bloody Chancellorsville Civil War battlefield and other historic sites would be spared under an alternate route state planners have unveiled for a highway bypass.
The fourth proposed route for the Outer Connector showed up in a map in the July edition of the Virginia Department of Transportation newsletter.
Harry Lee, a design engineer with VDOT's Fredericksburg district, said consultants came up with an ``avoidance corridor'' at the urging of officials from the National Park Service. The park service owns and operates the military parks in the Fredericksburg area.
The newsletter map shows the new route running from Five Mile Fork in Spotsylvania County through Pine Run and Turkey Run subdivisions before linking with Interstate 95 in Stafford.
The fourth corridor angered park officials, who complained that they warned VDOT about historic areas outside park property almost a year ago, and it caught local officials off-guard.
In May, the connector study team of local, state and federal officials agreed to cut the number of corridors to three.
``We come out of a meeting on May 3 with the idea that there's three lines and they send out a mailing and there's a fourth line,'' said Spotsylvania resident Gene Cunningham, a member of the connector study team and head of a citizens' transportation advisory group. ``Things are getting a little out of kilter here.''
Officials at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park have identified Civil War earthworks in the path of the other three corridors at Banks Ford and U.S. Ford on the Rappahannock. They also have objected to the impact two corridors would have on the Chancellorsville Battlefield along Virginia 3.
``We're looking at what would happen if we missed all these locations,'' Lee said. ``It looks like it could work.''
Park Superintendent Marti Leicester complained in a letter to VDOT that transportation planners should have considered the sites in the corridors after the information went to the department last August.
``The manner in which VDOT elected to frame this new alternative amounts to a distortion of fact, circumstance and law,'' Leicester wrote in a July 3 letter.
Federal environmental, transportation and historic resources regulations require VDOT to attempt to work around those areas once they know about them, she said. The areas identified by the park service are eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.
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