After decades of planning and debate, the North Carolina Department of Transportation has said it’s close to starting construction on the long-gestating I-26 Connector project.

But community members, including architects and planners, are still asking the agency to reconsider some of its designs, particularly a controversial and once-secretive overpass above Patton Avenue.

Though they’ve declined to attach a dollar amount to the flyover change specifically, NCDOT officials have noted that the winning design came in $190 million cheaper than any other bid. They’ve said building over Patton saves 15 months of construction time compared to an underpass, largely because it avoids having to relocate utilities in the area. In this time-is-money equation, the agency has said, it can’t afford to go ahead with the project any other way.

But critics argue that there are other ways to save money in the project, and that the NCDOT is only making matters worse by forging ahead with a design that never received sufficient public input. Criticism has come, too, over how changes in the project’s right-of-way will affect surrounding communities. And the flyover has continued to stir questions about the agency’s comportment with federal environmental law.

Top Asheville and Buncombe County officials have joined that chorus: In a letter dated May 22, Mayor Esther Manheimer and county commission chairperson Amanda Edwards asked the agency to consider reverting the flyover design to the underpass it once promised, and to listen to the community’s ideas to improve the look of the Connector and reduce its cost.

Manheimer said in an interview that she’s not asking the NCDOT to hit the brakes over the Patton Avenue issue, as she’s “heard from too many people in the community that want to see the project get done.”

“I think the community has questions, and they need to be satisfied that that really was the only other option,” Manheimer said. “Or if there is a way to return it to an underpass, I’d like to see that. The whole idea with Patton Avenue was to return it to local traffic, and it to be sort of a boulevard. That’s hard to do when it has a giant overpass going over it.”

In an email Monday, NCDOT spokesperson Stephanie Johnson said the agency is “committed to evaluating the alternatives proposed by the City of Asheville and members of the community,” as well as aesthetic improvements to the overpass.

“The feasibility of incorporating these ideas into the project will be assessed based on their impact on the project’s cost and schedule,” Johnson said.

The NCDOT agreed to an underpass design 15 years ago, after a proposal for a flyover was met with a similar outcry. In that case, too, the city and county threw their weight behind the alternative. But two years ago, the agency allowed one bidder on the project, the Archer-Wright Joint Venture, to flip the underpass to an overpass. Archer-Wright won the bid, and the NCDOT didn’t tell the public about the change until an Asheville Watchdog report revealed it in February.

The NCDOT has a timeline: New environmental studies will be done by March, construction will begin in late 2026, and right-of-way acquisition will wrap up in 2027. It’s the closest the project, conceived in 1989, has ever come to fruition — even if the debate over it has never ended.

‘You made a decision without knowing all the impacts’

In the weeks after the flyover became public knowledge, the NCDOT emphasized its position that nothing about the design change undercut its adherence to the National Environmental Protection Act. That law includes requirements that agencies pursuing projects with federal money research and disclose potential environmental impacts.

When the NCDOT released its final environmental impact statement for the I-26 project in 2020, it did so based on the design that the public had seen two years earlier — including an underpass below Patton Avenue. But the change to a flyover was “typical of the Design Build process across the state,” the agency told The Watchdog in an emailed statement in February. “There are no additional impacts due to this change and the project still meets the purpose and need, therefore does not violate the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) guidance.”

Nathan Moneyham, the construction engineer for the NCDOT’s Division 13, which includes Buncombe County, reiterated that stance at a meeting of the French Broad River Metropolitan Planning Organization the same month.

But when the NCDOT released an updated project timeline in April, it included a “NEPA Re-Evaluation” slated for this summer.

In a subsequent interview, Moneyham conceded that the agency needed to take another look at the flyover but said the reevaluation is not a complete redo of the NEPA process. 

It’s “to ensure the commitments to the (environmental impact statement) and the impacts are the same,” Moneyham said. He ascribed the need for the reevaluation largely to the fact that the project had gone through a cost-cutting process, called optimization and refinement, last year. 

Derrick Weaver, the NCDOT’s deputy director of technical services, said he expects the reevaluation to find impacts similar or less than the original plan. An NCDOT spokesperson said last week that the NEPA reevaluation is on track to be done late this summer, though a separate noise study will take until March.

Gary Blank, a North Carolina State University professor who teaches the NEPA process, worked on environmental impact studies for the NCDOT as a subcontractor for two decades. In an email to The Watchdog earlier this year, he noted that the process doesn’t have to leave the public happy, just informed.

“The agency can propose whatever it wants,” he said. “Even the most dire negative impact will be upheld if an agency follows its established procedure.”

Asked recently about the re-evaluation process, he said there’s precedent for the NCDOT altering a project when considering new information about impacts.

“Revisiting NCDOT projects from new perspectives usually results in positive developments that offer better outcomes,” he said.

Joe Minicozzi, a certified city planner and the principal of the Asheville-based Urban3 planning group, was among those who fought down the flyover design more than a decade ago, and he remains critical of its return; he’s argued that there are better ways to save money on the project. He said the NCDOT’s acknowledgement that the overpass requires a re-evaluation vindicates his criticism of the agency’s opacity.

“We’re supposed to know all of the impacts before the decision is made,” Minicozzi said. “That’s the thing I can’t get my head around — you made a decision without knowing all of the impacts.”

Right-of-way owners in limbo

Not far from Patton Avenue in a West Asheville neighborhood, first-time homeowner Sammi Burke worries about the project on a much more personal scale. Burke, who bought a 100-year-old home a year and a half ago, says the maps she looked at nearly two years ago showed questionable impact on her property, if any.

“At the time, I had no real understanding of what the I-26 project was or any potential impact,” Burke said. “I think it was listed in the listing as ‘unknown impact’ to the property, so I kind of just wrote it off and said, ‘I’ll figure it out when I get there.’”

At the time she bought, maps from 2018 were the NCDOT’s latest, and in the one showing her home on Vandalia Avenue, it looked like the impact on her home would be minimal.

Burke thought a new roundabout would be near her front yard — “not ideal” but livable, she said. But the updated maps show a different route and a driveway connection point “through a significant chunk of my front yard.”

The NCDOT has said the latest plans actually reduce the total number of families and businesses whose property is in the way of the project and will have to relocate, from 85 to 68. But when The Watchdog asked for a list of property owners who had been notified and a full list of properties set to be taken, an official said the list wasn’t finalized — and that the plans were a quarter of the way done.

According to NCDOT spokesperson Stephanie Johnson, some right-of-way acquisition began in 2019, but most of the property acquisition for the main Connector sections through Asheville is expected to begin this fall and be complete by the end of 2027.

Burke said she still feels like she’s in limbo, because it’s difficult to tell exactly where the roundabout will go and what its impact will be. 

“My bigger concern, in actuality, is the actual value of my home, because I’m a first-time home buyer and this was a significant investment,” Burke said. “We’re looking at what, six years of construction? Who knows what that’s going to do?”

Burke said she’s enlisted a law firm that specializes in eminent domain cases, “because I don’t know much about all of this, so I’d rather have some expertise behind me to help kind of navigate the whole process.”

At Crown Plaza Resort Asheville, located on the west end of the Capt. Jeff Bowen Bridge, President and CEO Dennis Hulsing has much more certainty about exactly what the NCDOT will take through eminent domain, but it leaves him with no less agitation than Burke has.

“From my standpoint, the disappointing part is if you think about all what they’re taking — they’re taking my clubhouse, all the fitness rooms, the indoor/outdoor pool, the spa, the driving range, all of that, and 20 tennis courts and four indoor tennis courts,” Hulsing said, also noting that the nine-hole golf course will disappear because the NCDOT will take about two and a half holes. 

Hulsing said the NCDOT’s initial offer was “less than 25 cents on the dollar” to rebuild what’s being taken elsewhere on his remaining property. The resort comprises 110 acres now, but Hulsing will be left with about 80 acres. The low offer may make it tough to get bank loans, Hulsing said.

As it passes through the resort property, the Connector will be elevated. Hulsing noted that guests leaving the main building will walk out to a parking lot with a view not of downtown and mountains but of a hulking interstate.

That, he says, will have a “negative impact on the remaining land,” and it’s hard to put a price tag on what it may do to business. Hulsing believes the Connector needs to be built, but he’s disappointed in the DOT’s offer, and how the agency flipped the underpass to an overpass.

“I hate that the final plan they selected went through me, and I hate worse I’m having to fight with them for what I think is right,” Hulsing said. “But if you take me and take that out of the picture, yes, it’s something that definitely needed to be done to correct the bottleneck.”

‘Yeah, we can do something’

The city and county’s insistence that the NCDOT hear out other ideas echoes the work of local designers and planners critical of the overpass. They’ve been developing alternative proposals since the flyover change was uncovered by The Watchdog. Many of their ideas emerged last month, during a weekend-long charrette — a high-intensity design brainstorm, in essence.

Minicozzi described the crowd as ranging from 20-somethings with virtual-reality headsets to contributors to the original underpass plan, who were already elder statespeople of the local design community when it seemed to win the day a decade and a half ago.

“People are really trying,” he said. “They really look for ways to try to make things better. Coming in with an attitude of ‘Yeah, we can do something’ — that spirit is back.”

Sonia Marcus, a West Asheville resident and member of the anti-flyover I-26 Citizens’ Coalition, described several core ideas during Tuesday’s City Council meeting. One includes a slight shift to the placement of the highway that local designers believe would allow it to avoid some of the utilities that the NCDOT has flagged as a costly disruption necessitating the overpass. Another would have the highway bypass Haywood Road altogether, a change Marcus argued would improve pedestrian safety in the heart of West Asheville while saving money; in its place, a frontage road within the highway’s footprint could connect Haywood to Patton Avenue.

And reducing the width of I-240, which is planned at 10 lanes in some places, to six lanes citywide could also save on construction and eminent domain costs, Marcus said.

“We also avoid turning 240 into any larger a monstrosity in our city than it already is,” she added.

The NCDOT may be poised to at least hear some of these ideas: Architect Rachel Murdaugh, a co-founder of the Citizens’ Coalition, said during Tuesday’s meeting that the group was in talks with the agency about meeting to go over the proposals.

And the NCDOT spokesperson’s statement Monday signaled a shift for the agency, which in recent months had signaled its reluctance to make any changes to the project — particularly reverting the overpass back to an underpass.

“Honestly, at this point, I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to make us change our mind, except delay the project,” Weaver said at the April 24 meeting.

Switching back to the underpass plan would add to the project’s cost, an idea the NCDOT’s top leadership is unlikely to accept. 

“Our executive leadership is going to say, ‘We’re not comfortable funding that right now, so we’re going to delay the project,’” Weaver said. “And they’ll push this money out to other projects and speed them up.”

Moneyham was equally blunt.

“There’s not any wiggle room,” he said at the same meeting. “This is the plan.”

Asheville Watchdog welcomes thoughtful reader comments about this story, which has been republished on our Facebook page. Please submit your comments there.

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. Jack Evans is an investigative reporter who previously worked at the Tampa Bay Times. You can reach him via email at jevans@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

Related