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‘Public input’
AN “ENERGY CRISIS” is as good a time as any to examine some aspects of Virginia’s Highway Department—a better time than most, really— and a departmental practice that deserves particular attention is the engineers’professed desire for “public input.” It has been suspected by many citizens that Virginia’s Highway Department doesn’t really care what people think, so long as they get out of the way of the bulldozers, and we must say that it is not hard to see how people could reach such conclusions. The most interesting current question of how serious the Highway Department is about “input” concerns 1-66 “inside” the Beltway. (1-66 in Fauquier County is another point, about which more later.) After a great hue and cry, and court orders, an elaborate “impact study” of the eastern extension of 1-66 was contracted for by the Highway Department, and—lo!—the studiers have now recommended that the road be completed just like the Highwaymen wanted.
Of course, four federal agencies involved have said the environmental damage would outweigh the possible advantages of the road project, and the jurisdiction most severely affected, Arlington County, is on record against it. But of what importance is that to the Highway Department? Highway Commissioner Douglas Fugate shocked even some pro-highway people when he jumped the gun on the “environmental” study by plunking for completion of the road, “energy crisis and “impact” noth with standing.
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