Center to seek federal court injunction on behalf of Bigelow Gulch neighbors to force environmental review of a controversial road expansion that looks a lot like the de facto North-South freeway.
Seven years ago Orchard Prairie residents were presented with what looked to be a relatively innocent county plan to widen and straighten Bigelow Gulch road. The early sketches were to add shoulders and turn lanes, to improve safety for motorists and make it easier for sheriff’s deputies to make traffic stops.
That was then. Now things are quite different. The plans to widen Bigelow Gulch Road have mushroomed from three lanes to six lanes at intersections, and the route is being set up to be at least the “temporary” connection that would, for many years at least, serve to replace an
uncompleted stretch of the North-South freeway that has bogged down because of funding problems.
The Orchard Prairie community members have seen enough and on October 21st, with the Center’s help, they’ve filed a 27-page complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington seeking an injunction to stop further work on the project until a complete environmental impact statement is prepared to address the full potential effects of the ambitious road widening. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are renowned Spokane photographer Don Hamilton, his partner Lorna St. John, Quentin Wood, and the Prairie Protection Association. The named defendants are officials with the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Federal Highway Administration, both of which, the complaint alleges, failed to fulfill requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the federal Administrative Procedures Act (APA).
“I’ve gotten involved in this to help protect a community that my partner, Lorna, grew up in,” says Hamilton. “If, for the greater good of our region our community must be sacrificed to a super highway, we think it should be done according to the law and not to a county engineer’s caveat.”
More to the point, Hamilton added, the Bigelow Gulch Road expansion project has become “the de facto completion of the North-South freeway.”
In particular, the complaint will allege that the federal agencies failed to comply with NEPA and the APA because the environmental assessment and findings of no significant impact failed to account for the scale of the project, its broad effects on the community, and its far-reaching
effects on wetland and the sensitive natural environment along the route where the road is to be widened. For example, the project will feed four lanes of traffic between East Valley Middle School and the school’s ball fields. The proposed solution? A tunnel between the school and the ball fields.
But a central part of the complaint is the project’s mission creep to become the missing link in the North Spokane freeway project “for at least 20 years until funding is available to complete the freeway” along its intended route.
“Here,” the complaint charges, “Defendants justify not taking into account the impacts of the freeway project, because they indicate Bigelow Gulch’s connection to the North Spokane Corridor is a ‘temporary’ one to end in 2025, despite [federal] prohibition on such actions. The County has indicated that Phase II of the North Spokane Corridor will not be initiated until proper funding as been secured. Because funding is an integral component of the North Spokane Corridor Phase II completion, the Department of Transportation’s argument that the impact is ‘temporary’ is tenuous at best.”
The Washington Department of Transportation has estimated the total cost of the Spokane Corridor Project at $2.1 billion.
“This case will ensure that our community has an honest discussion of our transportation options,” says CFJ attorney Rick Eichstaedt, “including the trade-offs of allocating scarce financial resources toward Bigelow Gulch instead of on the North Spokane Corridor or on alternative transportation, such as light rail.”
“By failing to complete an Environmental Impact Statement,” Eichstaedt added, “the Federal Highways Administration neglected to take a complete look at alternatives to the Bigelow Gulch expansion, as well as environmental impacts.”
The Bigelow Gulch project has been divisive and controversial from the start, resulting in allegations from Hamilton and other opponents of the project that the county’s engineering staff has run roughshod over the concerns of residents in this once quiet part of the county northeast of Spokane. When, for example, Hamilton tried to record county officials at a public meeting two years ago, county officials refused to talk about the project on camera and sought to force him to stop recording them.