Construction of the long-planned Champlain Parkway in Burlington’s South End could begin this December as long as the city approves a funding plan next month.
The Burlington Department of Public Works is asking the Board of Finance and City Council to approve “Cooperative Agreement Amendment No. 7,” which would cement a spending plan between the city and state for the two-lane, 2.8-mile, multimodal link between Interstate 189 and downtown Burlington.
Public Works Director Chapin Spencer submitted an update for Monday night’s council meeting, but members will discuss the plan in detail on June 3, he said. The original cooperative agreement was penned in 1998, Spencer said.
“The fact that this amendment will secure funds for the final design, bidding and construction phases of the project is a key milestone, as it will bring this project through to construction,” he said.
The Champlain Parkway will be 95 percent federally funded; the state will kick in 3 percent, Spencer wrote in his memo. The city’s 2 percent share, plus other “non-participatory” expenses, total $3.2 million. The sum will be paid for across three years, beginning with the city’s fiscal year 2020 budget, which is up for council approval next month.
Some of those expenses include street lighting, landscaping and amenities for pocket parks, the memo notes. The final amount depends on construction bids, which public works will seek after city council approval, Spencer said.
Once known as the “Southern Connector,” the Champlain Parkway was first envisioned in the 1960s as a four-lane freeway. Environmental concerns and legal appeals have delayed the project for decades, and only a few barriers remain, Spencer said.
A property owner has appealed to environmental court the project’s operational stormwater permit as well as two wetland permits. Despite the challenges, “we have a viable path forward to start construction,” Spencer said. “We are managing those risks accordingly.”
Spencer’s memo to the council touts other project milestones. Construction has been held up due to contaminated soils in the project area, but the state approved a remediation plan in March that will “isolate” the soils from human exposure, Spencer reported in his memo.
Earlier this month, the Federal Highway Administration held that a 2010 environmental review was still valid; last spring, a group called the Pine Street Coalition had argued it was outdated.
Over the years, and in response to some concerns, Spencer said the Champlain Parkway proposal has evolved into something “far different than it used to be.”
“This project is a much better project and well suited to enhance the vitality of the South End for years to come,” he said.
Correction, May 20, 2019: A previous version of this story misstated the city’s plan to pay for its portion of construction costs.
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Construction about to start this year huh . I’ll believe it when I drive on it . There’s always one more environmental boondoggle , review or funding issue to be dealt with . I hope to be wrong but for the past 40 years this has always been the case .
Great news!
LOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!
The Miro administration is actually taking this on? Laughable. The guy can’t figure out what to do with the big crater in the middle of downtown, and he’s going to complete this disaster? All he’s going to do is manage to bulldoze a bunch of people’s houses (at massive taxpayer expense) before running into an issue he can’t solve. What a joke.
At least there will be plenty of free parking for the xmas shoppers, though.
In all seriousness, if you’ve found enough funding to do this, how about fixing the water treatment facility first? You’re destroying Lake Champlain. After you do that, then maybe you can lay down a bunch of pavement that’s going to create more runoff to deal with, and maybe you’ll even have a system in place that can deal with it. As of now, all this will do is make an already bad situation worse.
I thought this was supposed to go west of Pine St. and meet up with Battery. This proposal filters traffic onto Pine St. Looking at the design this only alleviates the traffic problem on Pine St. for two blocks from Flynn Ave. to Lakeside. It might alleviate some traffic for the four blocks on Shelburne St. from Home Ave. to Flynn Ave. but I doubt it, that problem is poor left-turn design.
Assuming it gets completed, how long before it becomes a toll road?
It will probably be another 40 years before it gets done if it ever does
And who knows if it will be completed in another 40 years?
I believe one of the components of this plan is to “dead end” the south side of Pine Street where it meets Queen City Park Rd. For those of us who love the various Shelburne Rd by-passes as we head south into Burlington’s South End (Palace 9, Hannaford, Kmart) we are going to be stuck on busy Shelburne Road with everyone going downtown. I can’t imagine how this will help traffic flow.
The $3.2 mil in local costs doesn’t include the subsequent modifications of the road the City intends to make.
Note the incorrect characterization of the project by DPW: “The Champlain Parkway will be a two-lane, 25 MPH road serving as a vital 2.8-mile multi-modal transportation link between I-189 and our downtown. This Federally, State and Locally funded project will improve traffic circulation, decrease the volume of truck traffic on overburdened residential streets, and includes environmental upgrades and increases bicycle and pedestrian safety in the project area”
Doesn’t say “limited access”; asserts a connection to downtown which is false unless you think that motorized vehicle access via Pine from Lakeside to Maple will be magically improved on the same two lanes with simply traffic lights rather than four way stops as the change; relief in the neighborhoods from truck traffic as a solution to a problem of the City’s own making in not opening C1 for 25 years; and it fails to include separate and safe bike/pedestrian lanes. It won’t “foster the growing vitality of the South End” but rather eliminate 6 acres of industrial land and cut it off from So. Burlington’s adjacent commercial area and it won’t improve storm water but rather bury the City’s largest source of storm water pollution, accelerating erosion.
Other than that, this is an objective presentation of a City project entirely consistent with the history of this administration.