Asheville City Council once again debated the Interstate 26 Connector project, proposed by the N.C. Department of Transportation (NCDOT), during public comment at the March 25 meeting.
However, City Attorney Brad Branham reiterated that the city has no say in the final project.
“This is obviously not a City of Asheville project, this is a state of North Carolina Department of Transportation project,” Branham said.
Many Council members learned after a Feb. 11 city manager’s report that plans for the connector now include a large overpass spanning Patton Avenue. Earlier plans called for the expressway to pass under Patton.
“So we were just partaking in a process, giving input, and they were allowing and respecting input for a while, and now that they’ve dropped the input, we have no control?” asked Council member Sage Turner, who said she was upset about finding out about changes to the project after the city manager’s Feb. 11 report, which didn’t emphasize the overpass.
Council member Kim Roney has requested a follow-up presentation from NCDOT, to which she said it has agreed.
During public comment two presentations lobbied Council to oppose the overpass.
“Bring back the I-26 underpass or an acceptable alternative,” said Wendy Legerton, president of the WNC chapter of American Institute of Architecture (AIA) and principal of Legerton Architecture.
In 2006, the Asheville section of the AIA led an I-26 collaboration among local residents, architects, elected officials, an Asheville Housing Authority representative and NCDOT, Legerton said. It came up with a design deemed “Alternative 4B” that NCDOT incorporated into its plan.
Rachel Murdaugh, an architect with Clark Nexsen and co-founder of Citizens’ Coalition of West Asheville, whose mission is to advocate for the underpass design, created renderings of the current I-26, a version with the proposed overpass and one depicting the underpass that included a bike lane down the middle of Patton Avenue and sidewalks bookending the bridge over the French Broad river.
Initial bids for the project in 2024 came in more than $100 million over projections, prompting DOT to reconfigure the project. That’s when the overpass was added.
“We are asking for your support to engage in a genuine participatory design process — one that respects community input budget realities and honors the intentions of the original agreement of option of 4B,” said Dori Darras, business development analyst for kWh Analytics and co-founder of Citizens’ Coalition of West Asheville.
In addition to design recommendations, Darras urged Council to press the state to extend the public comment period beyond Friday, April 4, for NCDOT’s 10-year project plan.
Joe Minicozzi, urban design planner for Urban3 and a member of the group that developed Alternative 4B, gave the second presentation.
He strongly opposes the overpass plan, pointing out the noise the overpass will cause and its negative impact on property values adjacent to the expressway.
“Nothing in the law says we have to do the cheapest thing possible. It says to do the least environmentally destructive preferred alternative,” Minicozzi said.
This from the queen of soliciting and ignoring public input is just too good:
““So we were just partaking in a process, giving input, and they were allowing and respecting input for a while, and now that they’ve dropped the input, we have no control?” asked Council member Sage Turner”.
If it violates the noise ordinance, I will sue the city. Therefore, the city needs to pressure DOT.
Never fear council … we’ll all be long dead before this materializes.