You Show Me Yours

One evening in early June, a group of folks gathered at a filling station on U.S. Highway 59, a two-lane road that runs between Lawrence and Ottawa, Kansas. They piled into a car and drove a mile or so east to a patch of open prairie that might one day become home to a new, wider Highway 59. Once there, they lined up, spacing themselves roughly 15 feet apart, and began a slow trudge across the horizon. As the day's light dimmed, they lowered their heads and scanned the ground for any rare plants that might be endangered if the proposed highway were ever built. What they found is anybody's guess. They're keeping that a secret.

The evening's activity was another page in an ongoing saga to improve a highway. It began in 1995 with a fatal car crash, one of more than 10 that occurred on U.S. 59 during the '90s. Area residents decided enough was enough. They passed around a petition calling for improvements to the road. The berms were too narrow, they said. Sightlines were obscured. And lacking adequate police patrol, commuters often drove too fast.

They delivered the petition to the Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT). Officials there considered the plea but decided to spend their time and money on other projects. The residents kept pushing, however, until KDOT finally acquiesced. At a public meeting in Ottawa in 1998, state officials presented a plan: They'd improve the road by upgrading it to a four-lane highway. And they offered a choice. They could build the new road where the existing road ran or they could build it a mile to the east.

Residents were aghast. Either way, dozens of property owners stood to lose out.

A spate of public meetings commenced. For hours on end, residents stood before public officials and pleaded for their homes and farms to be saved. It was neighbor against neighbor.

As the meetings wore on, it became clearer that the eastern alignment would get the final nod. It also became evident that while the new highway was being planned and built -- a process that would take five to seven years -- nothing would be done to improve the old highway. Anticipating this, some of the folks who distributed the original petition formed the Franklin-Douglas Counties Coalition of Concerned Citizens (FDCCCC). The group grew and took action. Its members met monthly in a church just off U.S. 59 and delegated tasks. And, perhaps most significant, the group hired two lawyers -- Bruce Plenk and Bob Eye, both of whom had represented a Lawrence contingent that helped sink KDOT's decade-long effort to build the South Lawrence Trafficway, a much-needed bypass that was planned to go through wetlands outside the fast-growing city.

The coalition's biggest coup came this past spring, when KDOT announced it would prepare an in-depth report on how the eastern alignment of U.S. 59 might affect the region's historical, cultural, and natural resources. Dubbed an environmental impact statement, or EIS, the report demanded a great deal of research and preparation -- meaning the highway project has been delayed by at least a year.

FDCCCC members were proud to have slowed the gears of the highway machine. But the coalition wasn't about to rest on its laurels. A few weeks later, its members announced that they'd be compiling their own report. "We're doing a shadow EIS to ensure that all of the environmental, historic, and farming impacts are really taken into full account by KDOT," says Caryn Goldberg, the coalition's spokeswoman.

Though KDOT officials are used to public opposition to highway projects, especially in Lawrence -- "Does the phrase 'South Lawrence Trafficway' ring a bell?" asks KDOT spokesman Marty Matthews -- the coalition's announcement presented an unusual twist. "I don't think we've ever quite had that happen," Matthews says.

Funded by their own contributions, the group members embarked on a study that is in many ways identical to KDOT's. The activists are following the same strict federal guidelines. They've volunteered countless hours and hired a handful of experts.

In addition to combing the area's landscape for evidence of rare plants or birds, they've been digging through KDOT's files to learn how officials there are conducting their own EIS. They've found some interesting items, including references to their own group. In one memo, a KDOT engineer categorizes the controversy drummed up by the coalition as being "mostly from the NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome." In another, KDOT spokesman Ron Kaufman refers to a number of letters KDOT received from residents concerned about U.S. 59. There were more than twice as many letters opposing the new alignment as there were letters supporting it, and to dismiss the parity, he wrote: "As we all know, the strident opposition is self-supporting and tends to push away the supporters. The opposition surrounds themselves with those who agree with them, and then claim to know of no one who has a different opinion."

But coalition members are most upset about what they haven't found. In reviewing the state's documents, they uncovered references to various studies and reports that were not contained in the files. When they requested these documents under the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA), they were denied. This troubles them. "KDOT, as a public service agency, is duty-bound to do this work and report it to the public," says Goldberg.