A state report excoriating Spokane County for legal violations in the Bigelow Gulch Road expansion project raises an as-yet unanswered question: is the controversial $66 million project dead, or not?
The three-year battle by Orchard Prairie residents to stop a road-safety improvement project from becoming a super highway through a pastoral swath of northern Spokane County took an unexpected turn last month.
Bigelow Gulch Road, in northeast Spokane County
As the Spokesman-Review’s John Craig reported on January 23rd, a Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT) inquiry into Spokane County’s property acquisition for the road expansion found several major errors. Craig’s reporting also revealed an ugly behind the scenes conflict that, among other things, led to a sexual harassment complaint being filed by a WSDOT acquisition supervisor against the county official whose work she was charged with overseeing.
That there would be problems and controversy associated with the project is not a huge surprise given its history. But on the face of it, the WSDOT criticisms in the draft report raise the pointed question of whether the expansion project is dead in its tracks.
The WSDOT draft reportplainly states that the county’s real estate acquisition activities violated the federal Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisitions Policies Act of 1970 (URA), and not just slightly. It summarized the worst of the violations this way:
“Issues Precluding Certification”
•Early Acquisitions treated as Voluntary acquisitions.
•other early Acquisition issues
•insufficient property rights
•appraisal waiver requirements
•conflict of interest requirements
•remnant issues
•appraisal and AOS issues
“Potential Certification Issues”
•missing files
•questionable notes in file
•updated just compensation requirements
•appraisal waiver requirements
•expeditious acquisition requirements
•issues with diaries
•relocation appeal process
Map showing route of controversial project (in red).
The clear implication is that because the land acquisition activities conducted by the county violated URA rules, the project cannot be certified by WSDOT, and therefore it would be barred from receiving the millions of federal dollars that have been designated for the project.
“I was flabbergasted,” Lorna St. John says, when asked about her reaction to the report. “I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize how bad it was. It just shows how unethical and incompetent the county’s right of way department was and by extension how incompetent the county’s engineering and road department is.”
St. John grew up on Orchard Prairie and, along with her partner, Spokane photographer Don Hamilton, has been active in the Prairie Protection Association that has been fighting the road expansion.
The Center for Justice represents St. John, Hamilton, and other Orchard Prairie residents. Last March, federal district court judge Robert H. Whaley rejected the lawsuit CFJ brought on behalf of the project’s critics. The suit against the federal Department of Transportation alleged several violations of the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Although the Center has been working with Orchard Prairie residents to appeal Judge Whaley’s ruling, the conclusion in the WSDOT draft report that there are several problems with land acquisition that “cannot be fixed” may make any appeal moot.
“This report appears to leave the Bigelow project dead in the water,” said Rick Eichstaedt, the Center attorney working on the case. “Certainly one major question is how much this is going to cost the county and what future liability this is going to create for land owners that appear to have been unfairly treated.”
According to the S-R story, more than $4.2 million in federal money has already been spent on the project out of the nearly $20 million in federal funds slated for the project.
It’s the numerous “cannot be fixed” items in the draft WSDOT report that has Lorna St. John and others wondering what lies ahead.
Lorna St. John at a 2008 open house on the controversial road project.
“I still don’t know based on John Craig’s reporting [in the Spokesman-Review] how this plays out,” St. John says. “In a practical sense, if they can’t repair it [the land acquisition process] what does it mean?”
In Craig’s January 23rd story, both Spokane County Commissioner Mark Richard and Keith Metcalf, the WSDOT regional administrator, were quoted and paraphrased as being hopeful that the flaws found by the WSDOT review team were not fatal. Craig reported that Richard discussed the prospect of simply taking land acquisition responsibilities from the county and turning them over to WSDOT.
Metcalf was quoted as saying that Bigelow Gulch Road expansion “is an important project for the region,” and that it was a “long way” from being scrapped.
For this article we sought comments from Metcalf and WSDOT on the seeming contradiction between the numerous problems the department’s review team found that “cannot be fixed,” and Metcalf’s statement that his agency was still hoping to go ahead with the project.
However, WSDOT spokesperson Al Gilson replied that because the Center was participating in legal challenges to the Bigelow Gulch project, the department didn’t feel it was appropriate to answer CFJ’s questions about where the project now stands.
Although the Center is not active in a suit naming WSDOT, Gilson said it was still inappropriate for the department to “ give comments to the attorney web-site,” because WSDOT is still involved in the project that CFJ and its clients are opposing.
Gilson did say that the quotes from Metcalf in Craig’s January 23rd story are “accurate.”
—Tim Connor
