Any action on an Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department request to waive a policy that restricts central Arkansas freeways to six lanes likely will take a month, a top Metroplan official said Wednesday.
"We can turn that around in a month or so and get it back to the board," Jim McKenzie, the executive director for the long-range transportation planning agency, told the agency's board at its monthly meeting.
The department wants the waiver for its Interstate 30 corridor project. Under two construction alternatives that the department is considering, the 6.7-mile corridor between Interstate 530 in Little Rock and Interstate 40 in North Little Rock would be widened to eight or 10 lanes. A third alternative is to do nothing in that corridor.
The six-lanes restriction has been a part of Metroplan's long-range transportation plans dating back to the 1990s and is included in the most recent update, called Imagine Central Arkansas. Construction alternatives for the I-30 project require that the policy be abolished or that the project be granted an exception to the policy.
Of the two construction alternatives, one calls for eight main lanes and the other calls for six main lanes with four lanes segregated for local traffic in the vicinity of the bridge over the Arkansas River.
The department would like the board to consider abolishing the policy "in order to allow for the consideration of all the universe of alternatives to any freeway improvement projects in the future," said Jessie Jones, who is the agency's representative on the board and division engineer for transportation planning and policy at the department.
She said the department recognizes that it may take the board some time to consider the request, which is why it wants a waiver for the I-30 project, which is called 30 Crossing.
The request to waive or abolish the policy came in a letter earlier this month from Scott Bennett, the department director, to Jacksonville Mayor Gary Fletcher, the Metroplan board president.
At Wednesday's meeting, North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith, who is on the board, wanted to know if the board needed to take any action to "get the ball rolling."
McKenzie said no, that "the ball is rolling."
Another board member, Pulaski County's County Judge Barry Hyde, pressed for a timeline.
McKenzie said that while the waiver to the policy would take a month, the request to abolish the policy probably would take up to two months.
Allie Freeman, the president of the Rock Region Metro board who sat as the transit agency's representative at Wednesday's meeting, implored the board and its staff to involve the public in reaching a decision on what to do with the policy.
Freeman said he grew up in Little Rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Interstate 630 was built and forced the relocation of many families. He said he lived in a neighborhood "specifically affected by that construction. You don't forget things like that."
Freeman said he had the impression from board members' comments that the members will reach out to the public.
About a half-dozen critics of the project spoke up at the board meeting.
Among them was Kathy Wells, the president of the Coalition of Little Rock Neighborhoods, and Dale Pekar, a downtown resident who worked as an economist for several agencies.
Wells and another project critic, Barry Haas, say the project requires an environmental impact statement, which is a more detailed examination of its impacts than is an environmental assessment. The department is using an environmental assessment to assess the potential impacts.
Ben Browning, the department's design/build director who is helping oversee the project, said the environmental assessment is a "decision document," which means that once it is completed, it will say whether an environmental impact statement is required.
Pekar, among other things, questioned the $17 million in annual maintenance costs that the department estimated would be spent on the corridor under the "no-build" scenario.
Browning said that even if the project isn't built, improvements will have to be made in the corridor, including the eventual replacement of the bridge and pavement replacement. They would be done piecemeal over a much longer period of time than the four years contemplated for the 30 Crossing, and likely would exceed the department's estimated costs, he said.
Tom Fennell, a Little Rock architect who has developed his own alternative plan that includes transforming I-30 in the vicinity of downtown Little Rock into a boulevard and building another bridge upstream to handle future increases in traffic, said the project comes at a time when other cities are removing freeways, and he implored the board to think long and hard about what it is about to do.
"In 20 years, are you going to be able to say this was a good decision or a terrible mistake?" he asked.
Metro on 06/30/2016