Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 5 · column 1 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
THE HIGHWAY Department still hasn’t decided what it is going to do about highway improvements in the Sperryville area—whether to by-pass the town or build a planned fourlane rode through the center of town.
D.B. Hope, district engineer, appeared before the Rappahannock Supervisors at their meeting last Thursday, in response to a request for specific road information.
“We have a sewer plant problem there,” explained Chairman Newbill Miller, “and they want to know what the highway department is going to do before and if they put in the plant. If you’re going through downtown and take half of the houses, maybe we won’t need a plant.”
Miller put the question of Sperryville first on the agenda of the meeting because, as he explained it, “with that chart up there I can’t concentrate on anything else.” HopeandDonald Askew, resident engineer, came to the meeting with a huge aerial photograph of Sperryville, upon which had been marked down various possible routes for the new highway work.
HOPE RECALLED that at a hearing held in 1970, when the Highway Department definitely proposed widening the highway through the middle of town, only one person spoke and she was against this plan.
“It’s been in limbo ever since,” Hope admitted. “Additional studies have been made but not too energetically, and we are now scheduled for a decision after the first of the year, aiming at a possible beginning of construction after 1975.”
Hope continued: “When your request came in, I was advised that the department is now studying the feasibility of a bypass to the south of Sperryville, and that a decision on this will be made early in 1974, setting the exact location.”
In reply to a question from Commonwealth’s Attorney George Davis, Hope said the department has by no means “discontinued” the idea of widening the road as its passes directly through the town.
He also noted that theU.S. Park Service “won’t let us four-lane the road on up the mountain.”
HOPE ALSO talked of “advantages and disadvantages; in the purposed bypass . “It would take all the tourist traffic out of Sperryville,” he noted, and would cost approximately $1 million more to construct.
But if the road were widening in town, it would disrupt 14 houses and “a lot of folks don’t want to move out of Sperryville,” said Hope.
95.9%