SAFE STREETS BURLINGTON: Parkway Update: Lawsuit, Racial Equity Dismissed, Price Doubles, Innovation Center Joins Lawsuit

Sunday, April 3, 2022

Parkway Update: Lawsuit, Racial Equity Dismissed, Price Doubles, Innovation Center Joins Lawsuit

Pine Street Parkway US District Court Lawsuit Begins,
     Finally, May16

City Ignores King Maple Neighborhood Certified
      Community of Color with Zero Change in Parkway
      Blatant Environmental Injustice Design After
      Almost 3 Years Public Review

City Quietly Puts Parkway to Bid—Only One Bid
     Received Two Weeks Ago, About Doubles the
     Overall VTrans/City Estimated Total from $30
     million to as much as $60 million! (Yes, Pine Street
     RIGHTway would cut project construction costs by
     about one quarter!)

Fortieth Burlington, LLC Owner of Major Lakeside
     Office Complex, Innovation Center, joins Pine
     Street in Litigation at Vermont’s US District Court

April 2, 2022

Good Day Pine Street Grassroots Members:

Please note recent highlights as the Champlain Parkway moves from an almost three year delay to apply new Environmental Justice regulations (not a whisker of change in the harmful Parkway design!) to the Pine Street US District Court lawsuit filed June 6, 2019 (D-Day). And the apparent ill-timed rush to Parkway construction by the Mayor Weinberger administration. The one bid received March 18 signals a doubling of estimated construction costs! The Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission and VTrans estimates of $30 million for construction based on a partial Parkway construction bid of $40.1 million suggests construction costs doubling to about $60 million!

If you have not yet signed the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance petition to support our joint Champlain RIGHTway, please take a moment to visit the petition site provided at the end of this message. And continue to encourage our City Councilors and Legislative representatives to push for the exciting RIGHTway and its benefits (and save up to 25% of the construction estimate!) instead of the current harmful to the South End design!

When asked the question of who makes the decisions on the Parkway, one is reminded of a conversation between then former Secretary of Transportation Sue Minter following a campaign appearance in her campaign for governor when she told Pine Street leader Jack Daggitt in response to questions about the Parkway design, she responded simply “this is a City project!” Minter herself is said to have nixed roundabouts in the project in a 2015 meeting. Still, the point she makes is the Mayor of Burlington is the key person in decisions making regarding the Champlain Parkway. The Parkway is a City project!!

   Tony Redington
        Walk Safety Advocate
    for the Pine Street Coalition

Pine Street Parkway US District Court Lawsuit Begins,
     Finally, May16

Grassroots volunteer Pine Street Coalition (Coalition) filed at US District Court here in Burlington on D-Day June 6, 2019 with the purpose of stopping the obsolete, harmful Champlain Parkway design and obtaining a re-design which responds to safety for all modes, addresses climate change, and most important, relieves not adds to the overburden for King Maple neighborhood. The City now opposes and always has the current design cutting in two the now certified community of color King Maple and adding 22-37% more traffic and installing two injury generating traffic signals to an already overburdened low-income, community of color area.

Now the plaintiffs, Pine Street and Fortieth Burlington, LLC, Innovation Center owner face off with the City, VTrans and Federal Highway Administration with first legal brief filings due by May 16.

City Ignores King Maple Neighborhood Certified
      Community of Color with Zero Change in Parkway
      Blatant Environmental Injustice Design After Almost 3
      Years Public Review

It remains puzzling after almost three years and a unanimous strong public hearing opposition and comments against the Parkway cutting through the now certified King Maple neighborhood as a community of color—just why not a whisker of design change in this overburdened neighborhood where 32% of residents have no car access and are pedestrian dependent?

A major change this year is the National Roadway Safety Strategy document from the US Department of Transportation (January 2022)

https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS

This policy document calls for a “Safe System Approach” and “Safe System Intersections” (primarily roundabouts) to transport funding to address “preventable” serious and fatal roadway injuries—there are at least 21,000 preventable fatalities each year on US roads, about 30 in Vermont. (US plunged from first in world road safety in 1990 to18th today, ped deaths up 51% since 2010 with two recorded in Burlington.)

The new national strategy expressly makes both racial/low-income equity and climate change the two vital companion objectives in safety spending. The National Roadway Safety Strategy ties directly to 2021 Executive Orders https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyEquityClimate EO 13985 on Equity and EO 14008 on Climate Change.

It is difficult to conceive of a roadway investment in Vermont which could be more damaging to racial and low income equity and the climate than the current design of the Champlain Parkway!

City Quietly Puts Parkway to Bid—Only One Bid
     Received Two Weeks Ago, About Doubles the
     Overall VTrans/City Estimated Total from $30 million to
     as much as $60 million! (Yes, Pine Street RIGHTway
     would cut project construction costs by about one
     quarter!)

On March 18, Burlington opened the one bid for construction of just part of the Champlain Parkway between Main Street and Home Avenue—that bid, reportedly $40.1 million alone exceeds the $30 million City estimates on the books for about three years. The $40.1 million when added some time in the future of the balance of the Parkway from Shelburne Rd to Home Ave (“Road to Nowhere”) means the current Parkway design will double to about $60 million the current estimates.

This number also calls into question the $20 million estimate for the Railroad Enterprise Project (REP) which just about all in the City favor being built first to bypass the King Maple neighborhood already overburdened with traffic, pollution, and social disruption of high traffic volumes. The City is responsible for 100% of REP costs over $20 million.

Some say the Weinberger administration ill-timed bid maneuver was to avoid facing the court challenge and avoid a possible injunction stopping construction. That occurred at US District Court in the Circumferential Highway lawsuit when VTrans let contracts followed by the Court rejected the environmental document and the project died—same issue here with the Parkway?

Fortieth Burlington, LLC Owner of Major Lakeside Office
     Complex, Innovation Center, joins Pine Street in

Litigation at Vermont’s US District Court

It is news that the owner of Innovation Center on Lakeside Avenue took action recently to also oppose at US District Court the current Parkway design and seek a quality, modern South End transport facility which is safe, addresses climate change (Efficiency Vermont was a longtime tenant) and corrects the overburden for the low-income and community of color King Maple neighborhood.
Pine Street and Innovation Center have worked closely in the past in regulatory and State courts to obtain a responsible Parkway design.

Attached please note a simple example of a street, a dedicated bikeway, and sidewalk. This is the type of design Pine Street and Vermont Racial Justice Alliance call for between Queen City Park Rd to Home Avenue and from Home Avenue to Flynn Ave. It is the RIGHTway! It is “doing it right the first time!”

Please stay safe!

Yours truly,

Tony Redington
for the Pine Street Coalition

What can you do?

Sign the Stop the Champlain Parkway Project and Choose the Champlain RIGHTway Petition: http://chng.it/tS9Ts5FjDx SafeStreetsBurlington.com

No comments:

2021 Petition! Stop the Parkway Environmental Injustice !

What can you do?

Sign the Stop the Champlain Parkway Project and Choose the Champlain RIGHTway Petition: http://chng.it/tS9Ts5FjDx

The mission of the Pine Street Coalition is re-design of the Champlain Parkway by re-opening a new EIS process in order to incorporate “best practices” of today which include: (1) re-directing the “purpose and need” to meeting the needs of theSouth End neighborhood and away from facilitating the movement of cars to downtown; (2) reducing instead of increasing the number of roadway injuries to residents and visitors; (3) decreasing the environmental impacts, particularly in regard to the stressed Englesby Brook; (4) provision of separate and equal facilities for those who walk and bike along the corridor; and (5) utilize modern roundabouts to reduce injury rates to all users, cut global warming emissions and other pollutants, reduce gasoline use, reduce delay for all users, manage speed and thereby reduce noise levels and add scenic quality.

CHAMPLAIN PARKWAY REDESIGN GUIDELINES Let's Do it Right the First Time!

The Champlain Parkway Redesign Guidelines (Guidelines) arose from meetings and discussions in the South End and throughout the City. The grassroots group, Pine Street Coalition, seeks a new design process incorporating new laws and plans, particularly safety changes. The Burlington Walk Bike Council developed a number of walk and bike facility recommendations. Safety remains the principal consideration both dismissed and ignored in the 2009 environmental document and current design. The Guidelines provide a framework for viewing changes to the current obsolete design of the Parkway and present a new approach on choices possible in a new democratic design process once the current project design reaches its well deserved end. The Parkway dates from 1960s, the current design from a decade ago—times do lead to changes! The Guidelines include dealing with four major flaws reflective of the obsolete, invalid 2009 environmental document:
--Cutting 1.5 mile lane miles of roadway, including constructing on (not two!)--streets between Home Avenue and Flynn Avenue. Also provide for a safe, quality access to both new developments, City Market South End and Petra Cliffs --Retaining full connectivity of Pine Street now set to dead end short of Queen City Park Road which forces South End residents onto Shelburne Road to access Hannaford, the Palace and Lowe's
--Installing roundabouts instead of six new obsolete and unsafe signalized intersection to prevent an increase of about eight injuries a year to South End travelers --Providing separate and safe sidewalk and bicycleway from Home Avenue to Curtis Lumber
—Improve air quality and safety for King Maple low income/minority neighborhood while Flynn Street ending of roadway insure minimal traffic changes on Pine Street
--Conserving four acres between Flynn and Lakeside Avenues for economic development of the “Gilbane” property (now a large parking area) and for protection and improving stressed Englesby Brook

Online: https://www.facebook.com/SSBPineStreetNOW/ SafeStreetsBurlington.com

Southern Connector Rethinking

By Steven Goodkind P.E.

The Southern Connector Project is one piece of a larger transportation plan for Chittenden County that was formulated over 40 years ago. It consisted of a network of highways that would encircle the county through Burlington, South Burlington, Williston, Winooski, Essex and Colchester. Parts of it included existing state highways and the interstate. There were also proposed new roads i.e. the Northern and Southern Connectors and the Circumfential Highway.

These proposed new roads share many common characteristics. They were to be for the most part limited access routes that would take traffic from existing local roads and reassign it to these new segments. But just as importantly, they all contained a huge conceptual flaw by relying on the perceived benefits of the ring road concept. .

We have learned a lot in the transportation field in recent decades and it is now widely recognized that it is generally better to improve our existing system to make it safer and more usable to all modes of transportation, than to build new

roads. We have also grown to appreciate the benefits of neighborhood connections that are not separated by manmade barriers such as limited access highways or large development projects. (The Burlington Town Center is an example of the latter case).

As a result, only portions of the original plan have been constructed. They are the three “bypass segments”, including the so-called “road to nowhere” in Burlington. The ring road concept is essentially dead.

However, the old concept does live on in at least one project. The Southern Connector, especially the piece from Home Ave. to Lakeside, is a classic example of old thinking, the benefits of which are far outweighed by the negative aspects it delivers. Because the latest version of this project dumps its supposed

reassigned traffic right back onto Pine Street without a connection to Battery Street, it fails to provide any significant transportation benefit that could not be achieved by simply opening the “road to nowhere”. The current plan eliminates

existing neighborhood connections and removes the connection of Pine St. to Queen City Park Road. A better name for it might be the “Southern Disconnector”. It is a costly and unnecessary relic of the past. This is further compounded by a design for the Pine St segment that is not up to the standards that Burlington has set for “complete streets”. Even our Public Works Director has acknowledged this when he recently said, “if we were designing this project today it would not look like this.”

If we hope to be a 21st century city, we need transportation projects that have designs that reflect 21st century thinking, not 20th century throwbacks.

The Mayor and his associates say they have done their best and it is too late for that. If we don’t proceed, we will have to pay back $7 or 8 million to the federal and/or State governments. This may be a possibility, but making the city payback money for a project that has been significantly changed, (notice I did not say cancelled), is unprecedented in Vermont. Here are some examples:

1) At the last minute the Northern Connector Project was modified to end at Manhattan Drive rather than at Battery and Pearl. This was to avoid destroying a good part of the Old North End.

2) The Circ Highway has been substantially redesigned to use existing routes and much of the originally proposed design will never be used

3) About 25 years ago, governor Dean stopped the construction of the Southern Connector from Home to Lakeside because of the uncertainty that a connection to Battery Street could be built.

4) Even though ROW had been secured and some railroad facilities and the DPW offices in its’ path have been relocated, the Southern Connector route from Lakeside to Battery through the Barge Canal was abandoned.

5) The “road to nowhere” was constructed 30 years ago but never completed and never maintained.

6) In the 1980’s, South Burlington decided not to participate in a segment of the Southern Connector that would have been in their community.

In none of these cases were the communities asked to repay the money they had spent on the project. There has never been and there should never be a penalty for making a project better and/or less expensive. History in this case is clearly

on the side of RETHINKING, REIMAGINING AND REDESIGNING the Southern Connector. It is the smart thing to do! It is not too late!

SAFE STREETS BURLINGTON

Sunday, April 3, 2022

Parkway Update: Lawsuit, Racial Equity Dismissed, Price Doubles, Innovation Center Joins Lawsuit

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