Community needs this parkway

I was extremely disappointed to read about the lawsuit filed by the Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park to slow the Meadowcreek Park-way construction (“Suit targets Meadowcreek construction,” The Daily Progress, Feb. 26).
The interchange is an obvious necessity — much smaller roads on both sides of the U.S. 250 Bypass (Locust Street, Park Street and Rugby Avenue) all have overpasses, so McIntire Road becomes a massive bottleneck every morning and evening. The connection to U.S. 29 is also critical — currently traffic is being channeled onto Park/Rio, Locust and other streets, which were never intended as commuter through-streets, but as residential boulevards.

Aside from the clear need for the road that the community has expressed, projects such as this are critical to our country’s current economic plan. Assuming the cost of the project is $41 million (about $30 million for the city portion of the interchange and $11 million for the county portion) and the contractors have a 5 percent profit margin (probably high in this environment,) we are looking at about $39 million that will be spent creating jobs and purchasing materials, almost all of which will be U.S.–produced. This is precisely the type of project that President Barack Obama is pushing to move us through the current economic downturn.

The Sierra Club has pursued many worthwhile initiatives over the years. But this attempt by it and a few others to slow down the construction of the Meadowcreek Parkway, which has a large majority of citizen support in the city and county, is harmful to both our community and our nation.