Council joins foes of freight route title.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

JUNCTION CITY - The City Council gave a unanimous thumbs down to a state proposal to designate its main thoroughfare as a freight route.

Junction City joins Corvallis, 26 miles north along Highway 99 West, in opposing the designation. Such local input will be "very important" when the state transportation commission decides which roads to include, Oregon Department of Transportation planner Robin Marshburn said.

ODOT officials had proposed adding the highway - known as Ivy Street through this city of 4,500 - to its system of freight routes as part of a plan to beef up the network statewide. Marshburn said the state is trying to accommodate an estimated doubling of freight traffic in the next two decades. Under the plan, freight routes would receive higher funding priority for road improvements, but could also face more stringent standards, such as wider traffic lanes to accommodate trucks.

The council voted Tuesday night to send Marshburn a letter drafted by City Administrator Mike Leighton outlining the city's opposition. In it, city officials say they fear the designation would be a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating more freight traffic on what is essentially Junction City's "Main Street." Leighton's letter also said the city feared the designation would increase state restrictions on what the city could do along the road, while offering no guarantees of added funding.

"Junction City is in a growth stage and we deal with various restrictions at the state level," Leighton told the council at the meeting. "The proposal from the state would further restrict access on and off Highway 99, so we would have to go through another large bureaucratic phase to get something accomplished."

Council member Barry Schweigert, whose tax business was among Ivy Street buildings to suffer access problems during recent state improvements to Highway 99, echoed concerns about additional state restrictions.

"After watching Highway 99 get rebuilt, the scariest thing is that they could come in and say who can have a curb cut," he said of the state.

Councilor Ethan Nelson, citing testimony from a land use attorney during last month's hearing on the freight route, said those restrictions could apply even to properties well off the highway if they generated traffic on it.

Highway 99 West is one of three new freight routes initially proposed by the state. Another, Highway 126 East, was dropped from consideration last month, after residents living along the scenic McKenzie River Valley highway mounted fierce opposition to the change.

A third proposed freight route, Highway 126 West, has been endorsed by the Florence and Veneta city councils. Veneta City Administrator Ric Ingham noted, however, that his city's "Main Street," Territorial Road, runs perpendicular to the proposed freight route. Further, the city has already constructed a commercial bypass parallel to Highway 126, so that business development can occur without access issues.

Marshburn said Junction City's letter will be sent to the state's Freight Route Analysis Project Advisory Committee and to the Oregon Transportation Commission, both of which will vote this spring on the freight route system changes.

"Both the committee and the commission will need to look at all the input received along the corridor in terms of its function as a statewide highway and its function as a 'Main Street' through a community," Marshburn said. "It's going to be a balancing act. Of course, if there are several communities along a route that oppose the designation, that's a significant consideration."