What it will be is “an open book” as citizens from three states comment on Corridor K
Nine Tennessee counties rate this project their top priority
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Chattanooga, Tenn., Feb. 8, 2007 – “Corridor” is the only term now agreed upon by all to describe a talked-about future path from Tennessee to North Carolina.
Tennesseans want it built. Its state government and some contractors who allied with the state in this endeavor held a meeting here tonight. They wanted a lot of public comment to add to an earlier Draft Environmental Impact Study. The whole undertaking could change the landscape for a very long time. Billions of development and road-building dollars could be at stake. It is something for the residents in the Hiwassee River basin to know about and follow as best you can.
If ever this procedure resulted in a road, freeway, highway, greenbelt, multi-modal transportation path or whatever, it would move east. Its route could take it above, below or through the tight Ocoee River gorge. Then the thing would keep going east through, above, below or near Murphy and Andrews, North Carolina, and beyond.
There was a draft EIS completed for this corridor in 2004. However, it wasn’t distributed here during this meeting at the Development Center. All we had to go on was a study plan map depicting where the undefined construction might go, including through North Carolina’s Cherokee, Clay, Swain and Macon Counties.
Twenty-eight persons, including the Executive Director of the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition, signed their names on sheets at the front door, “but there were more than that who came,” said Beth Jones, who is Director of the Southeast Tennessee Development District based here. The 28 or more persons may have been few in number, yet they came from Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. A potential future freeway is something to cause people to sit up and take notice.
We broke up into groups and sat around tables talking for 15 minutes about how environmental and economic development concerns could be balanced. We wrote our comments on green sheets. I wrote that the Ocoee River Gorge already is saturated with traffic. You risk your life traveling on it dodging big trucks, or at last finding some pull-off to get out of their way.
I also wrote on my green sheet that three Georgia counties whose locations are white blanks on this corridor study plan map are at risk. They ought to be brought into the planning. If not, Towns and Union County residents could look up one day and wonder where the bulldozer noise was coming from. For their commissioners to apparently say, “Leave us out of it, we don’t want any part of it,” is not enough protection for the citizens. That’s what I wrote on my sheet, anyway.
The next day I asked Beth Jones of Southeast Tennessee Development District, what engineering project is being contemplated by contractors and the Tennessee Department of Transportation?
She replied: “The meeting was about trying to put together economic development plan for a corridor. If you’re asking if we’re talking about what project is being engineered, that’s still an open book. This was not to decide an alignment, or to talk about a strategy for a corridor development plan. There were a lot of ideas discussed. It might not be about a road, might be about a combination of different modes of transport.”
Southeast Tennessee Development District is a regional planning organization that works on behalf of local governments and is based here. The other hosts for this meeting, according to the agenda, were TDOT and Wilbur Smith Associates.
The latter has offices in many cities, including Knoxville, and it is based in Columbia, S.C. It is a company of engineers, planners and economists. It asserts on its web site: “Nothing is stationary. Not in your world. Definitely not in ours. For more than 50 years, moving you forward has been our mission and our passion. From airports and interstates to toll systems and economics, we help propel our clients toward performance beyond their expectations.” Wilbur Smith was “the first state traffic engineer in South Carolina.”
After we met in little groups and wrote our comments on green sheets, there was open discussion.
Jeanne Stevens, planning director for TDOT, said: “We are to come up with a sustainable economic vision.”
Others who rose and spoke weren’t asked to give their names and affiliations, but here are some of the comments made, and they surely are going into TDOT planning to check off how the citizens have been consulted.
“Economic development and the environment cannot be separated in this region.”
“There needs to be a provision for preserving family farms.”
“Areas outside an actual roadway – the convenience stores, the shopping centers – these could become an environmental concern, too.”
Western North Carolina is isolated and so there need to be roads bringing economic development here. That’s a paraphrase I have in my notes of what one of the attendees said.
“Nine Tennessee counties met last week and they said that constructing this road is the number one project for their communities.”
“The Appalachian Regional Commission and TDOT are to take this and come up with a balance between environmental and economic concerns.”
“The NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, requires you to identify the environmental consequences of a construction project.”
Although no date and time had been established, Melissa Zeiglar of Wilbur Smith Associates said another meeting like this will be held in Cherokee, N.C. However, a Clay County, N.C., resident said, “It needs to be in Murphy or Andrews. They’re the ones that are going to be most affected by this.”
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek community near Murphy, N.C., was a retired newsman, Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member/volunteer/donor and recipient of the 2015 Holman Water Quality Stewardship Award. Tom died on December 28, 2020.