Legacy Foes Take Cue From Georgian

Legacy Foes Take Cue From Georgian's Fight

Monday, December 18, 2000
By Brandon Loomis, The Salt Lake Tribune

CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- Jim Sensenbrenner might as well live on the banks of the Great Salt Lake.

His home in the oak woods 40 miles northwest of Atlanta sits squarely in the way of a freeway envisioned to handle swelling suburban traffic, just like Utah's proposed Legacy Highway.

For years, he has fought an emotional battle to save the retirement dream home he built with his own hands, the way some Utahans have fought to keep a 110-mile freeway from plowing through their homes or farms.

And like Legacy's detractors, Sensenbrenner would rather see commuter trains near his house to relieve traffic and clear the air.

"There's no need for a freeway. Not now. Not by a long shot," he said, pointing to the uninhabited swales and pine stands that would inevitably give way to suburban development. "The only people who would benefit right now are some old boys running dead chickens back and forth."

The only thing different from Utah's Legacy Highway debate so far is that, in Georgia, those arguments have worked. Only a small part of the originally envisioned 211-mile route remains in the region's 20-year transportation plan, and its funding is in question while more than half the plan's dollars have been shifted to transit upgrades.

Now, Utahans who want to block Legacy have hired Bob Yuhnke, the same attorney who fought Atlanta's "Outer Perimeter" highway, and hope to use the same game plan that set the Peach State on track for a mass-transit future.

"We're very interested in what's going on in Atlanta," said Nina Dougherty, chairwoman of the Sierra Club's Utah chapter. "There still needs to be a switch in priorities here in which we're doing transit first."

The Battle Plan: With the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers apparently poised to approve a wetlands permit this winter to begin construction on Legacy's first leg in Davis County, the Sierra Club has narrowed its recent objections to the theme that went furthest in Atlanta: air pollution.

"We'll be challenging the air conformity [finding]," said Marc Heileson, program director for the club's Southwest region. "We have high-pressure inversions in the winter, which trap pollutants. The more auto dependency we get with sprawl growth, the more we're going to see an increase in air-quality problems."

Even though the transportation-planning Wasatch Front Regional Council insists it has the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's verbal approval of an air-quality conformity plan that includes Legacy construction, the Sierra Club argues building the freeway and filling it with cars and trucks would push the region over federal pollution standards. Any new construction that leads to pollution violations is not allowed, and the Sierra Club plans to press the issue -- in court if necessary.

At issue is the computer model used to predict pollution after Legacy construction. The state averaged the predicted vehicle speeds throughout the day, avoiding the low speeds of traffic jams that are known to create the most tailpipe emissions. Dougherty said EPA officials in Utah have allowed this so far -- their counterparts in Atlanta have not -- but her group's consultants say a truer gauge of speeds would increase expected pollutants by 4 percent. That would push the region above federal limits and dash the state's hopes to build the freeway.

The Wasatch Front Regional Council, comprising county and city representatives from Salt Lake City to Ogden, says its modeling is by the books. It was designed or approved by the EPA, the Utah Division of Environmental Quality and other regulators, said WFRC Executive Director Will Jefferies. "It's not something we dream up in the back room." Legacy foes, he said, ignore automobile and gasoline technologies that are expected to reduce emissions. Such improvements have helped the Wasatch Front remain below the pollution levels that were predicted 10 years ago.

"There is a lot of publicity that overstates the air-quality impact of using our transportation system," Jefferies said.

Transit vs. Roads: Atlanta's projections argued for an end to planning only for freeways and roads, said Stanley Meiburg, deputy director for the EPA's Region 4 in Atlanta. He recalled a 1969 magazine article that said Atlanta was at a crossroads and must decide between transit and expressways.

"We see now the consequences of choices made 30 years ago," he said.

"We're still at that crossroads and we should avoid being in the same spot 30 years from now."

The EPA declared Atlanta's transportation plan out of conformity in 1998 because a computer model predicted the region could not emit less than the maximum 214 tons of air pollutants daily under the plan. The Atlanta Regional Commission, which plays the same planning role as the Wasatch Front council, shuffled priorities away from roads.

"There's a radical shift in funding," Meiburg said. "Two-thirds of the new money was to go to transit." So the EPA predicted Atlanta would get below 214 tons a day by 2005.

It often takes such an emergency to catch the public's attention and change priorities, said Lucy Smethurst, director of Atlanta's Clean Air Campaign, which is trying to change commuting habits.

Atlantans drive 115 million miles per day, or 35 miles per capita, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project. That's the most nationwide and a full 15 miles-a-day higher than the Salt Lake region's average.

"We are the drive capital," Smethurst said at a smart-growth conference in Atlanta this month.

Most people in the region threw their support to new transit proposals when pollution publicity -- and increased asthma attacks -- hit Atlanta, she said.

"Our reputation as a wonderful place to come and live was beginning to be questioned, and it has continued to be questioned."

Wendell Cox, an Illinois-based transportation consultant who frequently derides rail-transit construction, said he hopes the EPA under President-elect Bush will be more reasonable than the agency that forced Atlanta to shortchange its road network. Bush's election also has some Utah road proponents hopeful that the EPA will not stand in Legacy's way.

Cox studied Atlanta's troubles and presented a report to the region's transportation planners last month.

"Atlanta, which has really bad traffic at the moment, is going to have worse traffic in the future," Cox said. "[The] EPA is playing the role of regional planning authority. They've got the area scared to death" about losing federal funding because of air pollution.

"It's an effective threat when you have an ideological EPA like we've had in recent years that isn't interested in facts," he said. Stop-and-go traffic is worse for the air than new freeways, he said, which is the same argument that the Utah Department of Transportation makes to tout Legacy.

"I realize that doesn't fit into the politically correct articles of religion for the 'smart growth' crowd," Cox said.

As a result, Atlanta regional planners have allocated 55 percent, or $20 billion, of their 20-year projected budgets to transit that would expand the existing subway system, add light-rail circulators and create a vast web of commuter-rail lines into suburban counties.

By contrast, the Wasatch Front Regional Council's 20-year plan -- to be updated next spring -- gives about a quarter, or $7 billion, to transit.

Most of the remainder goes to maintaining roads, though some would build the first segment of Legacy, from Salt Lake City to Farmington.

All the investment in transit won't cut air pollution because central cities are the transit hubs but are no longer the largest job centers, Cox said. "It's not because people wouldn't like to ride it." It just doesn't go where they need to go.

But Lawrence Frank, a Georgia Tech architecture professor and lead investigator for an Atlanta-area community design/air quality study called SMARTRAQ, said census figures still show that people who live far from the city's center or wherever they work and play pollute the most.

"We drive three times as much in the disconnected areas of this region, and also cause three times the pollution," Frank said. And building suburban freeways is the surest way to spur development in remote areas, he said.

"There has to be some thought of using the existing infrastructure, where we've already got roads," Frank said.

Cox does not necessarily disagree with that. The Atlanta region's biggest traffic nightmare, he noted, takes place on much-ignored surface streets.

"The [Outer] Perimeter is not the highest priority in Atlanta," Cox said, adding that some segments of it still might be needed to handle truck traffic and suburban job growth.

Cox believes smaller freeways that serve projected suburban job centers may be the way of the future. They would replace the traditional spoke-and-wheel designs -- which led to beltway construction -- that gained prominence in the 1950s.

The northern-most reaches of Atlanta's planned Outer Perimeter probably fit the new pattern, and eventually will be built even if the rest of the beltway is not, Cox said.

That leaves retiree Sensenbrenner's home with a continuing cloud over it. He claims his property is virtually worthless until the Georgia Department of Transportation makes up its mind, and he doesn't want to sell to the state unless it agrees to replace everything -- his trees, his horseshoe pits, the play area he built for the twin grandsons he and his wife are rearing. He knows it won't.

Sensenbrenner moved to his land in 1986, shortly before retiring as an airplane engineer. He has fought the freeway since it was announced in 1988.

His rec room/office sports 15 volumes of three-ring binders documenting everything from newspaper articles about the freeway to its official environmental studies. "There's no other library like this in the state of Georgia, " he said.

He has enlisted a wealthier neighbor to sue the state over wetlands protection, and has joined each effort to block construction, whether based on air quality, water quality or sprawl.

"It hasn't been a simple thing," Sensenbrenner said. But so far, ironically, the region's air pollution has saved him.

He said he expects to stay here, without a freeway in his yard, regardless of whether the suburbs swallow his rural neighborhood. His dogs circling his feet, he looked up at his home and recounted how he drove in every nail. He said he won't give up no matter how many times the state comes back.

"Somebody could get killed," he said. Then he laughed.