Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 10, 1995 TAG: 9501100047
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The latest segment of the parkway may not be quite what its creators had in mind. The newest 1.5-mile chunk of parkway glides alongside old garbage. The trash, though, will be out of sight.
After eight years of entanglement in federal, state and local red tape, the spur road connecting Explore Park with the parkway appears close to being put out to bid.
Getting the spur built "is the most important issue before us," Explore Director Rupert Cutler told a joint meeting of Roanoke City Council and the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors on Monday.
It will take two years to build the road connecting Explore to the millions of visitors who pass by on the parkway. A temporary access road from the parkway was built last spring, and Rutrough Road was improved to provide easier traveling to Explore.
Part of what has made the project so time-consuming is the old regional landfill on which the road will be built. Closed last summer, the landfill has been capped and closed but must be monitored for 30 years.
The federal officials had never dealt with a parkway going over a former landfill before, so that took longer, said Joyce Waugh of the county's economic development department. The road plans were completed just last week.
Money for the project was appropriated by Congress back in 1987. The final hurdle is approval by the city, Roanoke County and Vinton - which own the landfill - to transfer some of the land needed to the landfill authority.
The road will run alongside the old landfill, but will be built on an 80- or 90-acre site that does not have garbage buried under it. Because the spur will be part of the Blue Ridge Parkway, it must be built to exacting specifications - box culverts, for example, must be stone-faced.
"It's not just a regular road and it does have to be aesthetically unique," Waugh said. At the same time, modern safety standards had to be met.
Explore, a living history and environmental park, will use some of the former landfill for Native American pow-wows, botanical studies and period activities. Part of the landfill is being transformed into a "native prairie" through an Explore-Virginia Tech project.
Cutler also is trying to get area governments to back a regional visitors center on the spur road. The parkway has plans for a center in the Roanoke area, and Cutler wants it to be near Explore. Mayor David Bowers asked the city attorney Monday to look into a City Council endorsement.
Congress approved $12 million for the spur in April 1987, and the Virginia Department of Transportation approved another $3 million the next year. About $2.7 million of that was used by the National Park Service for an environmental impact study of what originally was going to be a 10-mile-long Roanoke River Parkway stretching from Vinton to the headwaters of Smith Mountain Lake.
That project proved to be too expensive and environmentally sensitive and was pared down to the current 1.5-mile spur.
The Federal Highway Administration has designed the road, will put the work out to bid, and will oversee construction. The Board of Supervisors is expected to give tentative approval to an ordinance today to transfer the landfill property to the landfill authority; final approval would come at the next meeting.
The Roanoke Valley Resource Authority has responsibility for the closure and care of the old landfill. And making the authority the owner of the land means the federal government has to deal with only one entity instead of three localities.
Keywords:
POWWOW
by CNB