Utah's 'Legacy' of compromise
There are no comments for this page [ Add Comment ]Saturday, October 20, 2007
When Utah Department of Transportation Executive Director John Njord took his turn at the microphone earlier this week to celebrate the halfway mark for Legacy Highway's construction, his comments included, "As I drove up here today, I could smell asphalt in the air. And that's the smell of progress."
It brought to mind that chilling line from "Apocalypse Now," when Robert Duvall, portraying Lt. Col. Bill Killgore, says, " I love the smell of napalm in the morning. ... The smell, you know that gasoline smell ... . Smelled like ... victory."
Absurd? Maybe, but the Killgore-Njord connection is not completely without ironic value. Legacy has been nothing short of a cold war between environmentalists and government. It has been a brutal, expensive battle for state government and taxpayers.
Construction was stopped shortly after it began in 2001, the result of a lawsuit filed by environmentalist groups and joined by Salt Lake City's mayor.
Originally expected to cost $451 million, the freeway between Farmington and Salt Lake City's northwest corner was originally conceived as an alternate route for truck traffic to bypass the I-15 bottleneck -- especially during peak commuter hours -- through southern Davis County. It also was to be a way around freeway-closing accidents on I-15, which have periodically stopped traffic altogether and left motorists stranded for hours at a time.
As the years dragged on without work being done on the road, cars continued to stack up on 1-15 during the morning and evening commutes, and state transportation officials and lawmakers grew less and less confident that the federal courts would side with them in the final analysis. They wanted to get the road built, and figured the $685 million price tag -- inflation's a real pain in the pocketbook -- would be better than an eventual $800 million, $900 million or $1 billion if they continued to battle environmentalists in the courts.
So they compromised with the plaintiffs. The highway would be narrower, the road surface would be asphalt instead of concrete, speed limits would be reduced to 55 mph and there would be no tractor-trailer rigs allowed on the road until 2020. It was a crushing defeat, in many ways, but the state got to restart construction on a road that, even in its diminished form, was badly needed.
And it revealed something about the environmentalists, too. Their fight wasn't really a philosophical battle, after all. It turned out they weren't as much concerned with stopping a roadway through sensitive wetlands, as they had consistently claimed. Instead, they used the courts to bully their way to the negotiating table, where they settled for temporary compromises before dropping their lawsuit. In the end, they got the essentially the same wetlands, a few more acres of open, undevelopable ground on the west side of the highway and a story of "victory" against the state on which to peg future fundraising efforts. And all it cost the taxpayers was an extra four years in slow traffic -- and $234 million by way of inflated construction costs that could have been spent on any number of essential services.
Yes, we're pleased to see the Legacy project at the halfway point, and to hear that motorists should be driving on it within a year. But it's been a costly, disappointing slog to get this far. And we won't be certain if anyone learned much from this bitter lesson until it's time to extend the Legacy north from Farmington to Layton. Stay tuned.
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