Parkway suffers from avalanche of deficiencies.

Byline: ROB HANDY and BECKY STECKLER For The Register-Guard

REPEAT SOMETHING often enough, and even falsehoods sound true.

In his April 8 guest column, state Rep. Robert Ackerman distorts the intent of the November 2001 advisory vote on the West Eugene Parkway. Ackerman, an attorney, should know that the fate of a federally funded highway is ultimately a federal, not a local, decision. Promotion of the results of the local advisory vote is deliberately deceptive. Marketing the "we voted for it" hyperbole diminishes the planning process Ackerman claims to support.

The parkway vote directed city officials to "pursue funding and transportation and land use approvals to facilitate construction of the West Eugene Parkway." The nonbinding vote initiated a review by the various planning commissions charged with studying the regional impacts of the proposed amendments to TransPlan, the West Eugene Wetlands Plan, and the Metro Plan.

The Lane County Planning Commission and the Roads Advisory Committee basically rubber-stamped the proposals without bothering to understand whether the amendments would comply with state and federal laws.

The Springfield Planning Commission recommended the West Eugene Parkway proposal, even after acknowledging they did not understand Eugene code or Oregon land use laws to which the amendments applied.

The Eugene Planning Commission found financial, environmental, technical and legal deficiencies with the parkway proposal. Commissioners put the plan amendments through a rigorous and thorough review. Their inspection of the amendments yielded more questions than answers. Subsequently, commissioners voted to recommend that the Eugene City Council not approve the proposed plan amendments.

Consider some of the deficiencies of the West Eugene Parkway proposal:

It's financially deficient. Throughout the campaign Ackerman claimed that "the money is there." Yet on April 8 his claim changed to "voters knew the money was not there."

The 20-year TransPlan budget demonstrates that we can't have safety and capacity projects on existing roads if we also have the parkway or an altered Belt Line Road-Interstate 5 interchange. Furthermore, we can't have the parkway and BeltLine-I-5. In fact, in mid-May, elected officials will present funding requests to the Oregon Department of Transportation, reflecting safety and capacity projects on existing roads, and a Los Angeles-style spaghetti bowl interchange at Belt Line- I-5. This alone puts the parkway in limbo.

Finding new funds is a dim prospect. In May 2000, voters shot down Measure 82, a modest increase in the state gas tax to fund new roads, by an 8-1 margin in Lane County.

It's an environmental disaster. The West Eugene Parkway violates most federal environmental laws that pertain to highways. Section 4(f) of the 1966 Transportation Act prohibits building federal aid highways through parklands. The parkway violates the Endangered Species Act. Laws prohibiting project segmentation and identifying a road's logical termini (destinations) would be broken. This plan cannot pass federal muster.

Locally, parkland protections would have to be removed to allow the highway through the west Eugene wetlands. An April 9 letter from Ackerman to city staff asserts that west Eugene wetland regulations are only policies and offer no protection against development. The piece he left out is that policies are a response to state natural resource protection laws that do require certain protections for those lands in question.

It's a technical boondoggle. Traffic analyses related to the West Eugene Parkway predict intersection failures along West 11th Avenue and Belt Line even with widenings of Belt Line - yet widening projects would need to be canceled to fund the parkway. Traffic modeling for the parkway also predicts failures along West 11th at north-south connections with Belt Line, Bertelsen Road, Bailey Hill Road and Seneca Road. Yet these intersections have had their upgrade funding drained away by the West Eugene Parkway.

The real purpose of the parkway is to puncture the urban growth boundary and facilitate construction of subdivisions and strip malls around Fern Ridge Reservoir, not solve traffic congestion in west Eugene.

It's a legal loser. The highway would decimate the parklands administered by the Bureau of Land Management, which has spent $12 million over the past decade to acquire and restore native wet prairie habitats that are almost completely gone. These lands were acquired through the Land Water and Conservation Fund and are barred from being turned over to the state transportation department. Federal policy stresses conservation fund land shall be "immune to development."

There's an alternative. Meanwhile, the Oregon Department of Transportation has yet to acknowledge alternative options. The department hasn't analyzed other solutions for transportation connections between western Lane County and Interstate 5 that would work better, cost less, and preserve protected parklands.

This kind of solution was used in Portland, and resulted in land use shifts that concentrated new growth around transit stops. An alternative, known as the Land Use Transportation Air Quality project, worked for Portland, and can work for our community as well. There are no technical reasons why such a solution cannot work in west Eugene. The only thing lacking is political leadership.

Concerned citizens must pick up the slack in the absence of civic leadership. Our community can be a model for sensible land use and transportation planning, or we can be a poster child for violating laws that protect parklands. The livability and fiscal viability of communities are at stake, as is our tradition of honest civic debate.

Rather than offer answers before questions have been evaluated, let us ask questions and explore solutions.

Rob Handy is a land use and transportation advocate working with others to promote an alternative solution to transportation problems in west Eugene. Becky Steckler is a graduate teaching fellow at the University of Oregon and a member of Friends of Eugene.