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Rappahannock News Staff Writer
Despite heat, humidity, and a conflict with the televised acceptance speech of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, some 150 county residents filled the elementary school gymnasium — sans air conditioning — for the Virginia Department of Transportation’s public hearing last Thursday on the proposed dual-laning ofRt. 211.
Testimony was essentially a reprise of arguments voiced at local government and highway hearings since the opposition to the project first surfaced six months ago: proponents cited accidents, fatalities, and the increase in traffic to show justification from a safety standpoint and opponents argued that more modest improvements — widening shoulders, adding turn lanes, and shaving hills — would accomplish the same ends for less money.
But this time, opponents also maintained that VDOT’s own study recommended against dual laning, and they posed a conspiracy theory, charging that the improvements to Rt. 211 are part of a master plan involving the new inland truck port in Front Royal and the eventual dual-laning of Rt. 522 to Massies Corner and Rt. 231 in the F.T. Valley to Madison with a bypass around the village of Sperryville.
The four-laning of Rt. 211 was initiated in 1964 as a directive from the Virginia General Assembly as part of an upgrade of the state’s arterial, or primary, road system. The road was built in sections moving out from Warrenton, the stretch from Rt. 613 at the county line to Rt. 640 west of Amissville the most recent to be finished, that coming in the late 1970s.
But funding shortages caused by a combination of declining gas tax revenue and spiraling costs for labor and materials led to postponement of the final 4.4 miles between Washington and Sperryville despite annual requests at the district primary allocation hearing by the Rappahannock Board of Supervisors that the work be given higher priority. Finally in 1987, with Governor Gerald Baliles’ pro-highway initiatives bringing in new money, the last stage of Rt. 211’s dual laning, estimated to cost $12,393,780, was set to go out for bids in two parts in July, 1989 and 1990.
At road hearings over the past decade, Rappahannock’s supervisors have publicly and repeatedly named the widening of Rt. 211 between Washington and Sperryville as the county’s highest priority road project. In addition, the dual-laning is called for in Rappahannock’s comprehensive plan, a document which was aired at information meetings held in all five magisterial districts and at public hearings before the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors.
In 1978, responding to opposition from businesses' and residents of Sperryville, the highway department did eliminate from the Rt. 211 project a proposal to bypass the village, but it wasn’t until six months ago that anyone raised objections to the highway widening itself.
Since then, however, the opponents have organized as Friends of Old Rt. 211, collected more than 500 signatures against the dual-laning, hired an attorney, taken their case to the Board of Supervisors, Planning Commission, and highway department, and persuaded VDOT to hold last week’s public hearing. And to their challenges of VDOT’s traffic counts and rationale for the planned improvements, the opposition has now added charges of conspiracy and deliberate omission of findings which are at odds with the department’s publicly stated intention to build the 4.4 mile stretch of four-lane.
Timothy Pagano complained that VDOT has not made public its cost/benefit analysis of options to four-laning. “So far, we’ve only seen this project — either we have this or we have nothing, and I don’t see that as the only alternative.” He also contended that the department’s own value engineering study recommended
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