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By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON
Rappahannock New Staff Writer
Facing a hall full of environmentalists in Warrenton last month, Transportation Secretary Vivian Watts remained rock steady in her support of a “new transportation corridor” to be built within the next 15 years to relieve congestion on the Capital Beltway.
But she was equally firm in her insistence that no route for the proposed superhighway - planned as sue to eight lanes and estimated to cost anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion - has yet been decided. “No one has even begun to draw a line on the map,” she told the audience, most members of the Mid-Fauquier Association, a citizens group which has formally registered opposition to an alternative that would take the highway through Prince William, Fauquier and Loudoun counties and across the Potomac at Point Of Rocks.
To bridge the river, Virginia needs the concurrence of Maryland, which to date has opposed the growth-generating superhighway’s crossing there into the farm land of rural Frederick County. Instead, Maryland favors an eastern by-pass which would cross the Potomac northeast of Fredericksburg and link with the Route 301 corridor through Prince George’s County, an area slated for development.
Watts said that Virginia is “hopefully getting closer every day” to resolving the issues with Maryland. “We can’t go forward without a cooperative study,” she said, adding that the Commonwealth’s transportation planners need to know what Maryland is going to do with the Route 801 corridor.
She raised the possibility that
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