Boyd pushes for immediate opening of Meadow Creek Parkway

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors will vote Wednesday on a resolution urging the Virginia Department of Transportation to open the county portion of the Meadow Creek Parkway as soon as possible.

According to the resolution, opening the road now is critical to keeping its surface from deteriorating. Without cars driving on it, Supervisor Kenneth C. Boyd said, the surface of the road won’t settle properly and could begin to deteriorate.

Further, Boyd, who brought the resolution forward, said the road has been delayed long enough and is needed to alleviate traffic snarls on East Rio Road.

“Enough’s enough. Forty years and we still can’t open it or use the park, enough is enough,” Boyd said. “There’s overwhelming support from county residents and a number of city residents who have contacted me that they’d like to see it open.”

Boyd said ongoing negotiations with the city to open the road haven’t produced the result he wants, and it’s time for the county to take a stand.

Supervisor Dennis S. Rooker said he thinks passing a resolution at this point would be premature.

“VDOT is supposed to get some traffic data together about how opening this road would impact the city streets ... And then we were supposed to get together and talk about it again,” Rooker said. Without that data, he said, he wouldn’t support the resolution.

“I think we would be jumping ahead of what we discussed ... So I think that our moving ahead without waiting for that information to come back is precipitous and there are certainly people on City Council who will be upset,” he said.

VDOT spokesman Lou Hatter said the numbers are in the works, but couldn’t say when they would be ready.

“We are working on updating traffic projections related to the parkway’s effect on the nearby roads,” he said.

Despite hesitance to vote on a resolution without traffic data, Rooker agreed that most board members would like to see the road in use.

“There’s nobody on the board that doesn't want to see the road in use, but we do need to go about this in a reasonable way,” he said.

Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris said the resolution would violate an agreement between VDOT, the county and the city.

“The key thing to note is that we have a three-party agreement between the city, the county and VDOT that no part of the Meadow Creek Parkway would open until the entire project was finished,” Norris said Monday. “We have held up our end of the agreement in going ahead with the construction of the parkway, over the objection of many in our community, I might add.”

For Boyd, the $34 million project needs no further discussion. He said he hopes to get the resolution passed and for VDOT to not only notice, but take action.

“My intent is VDOT’s reaction is to open the road ... the day after the meeting if that’s all they need is the board’s decision,” he said.

Without the road open, Boyd said, there is a dangerous traffic snarl at its northern terminus, next to the Charlottesville Albemarle Technical Education Center and the entrance to Dunlora subdivision.

According to Hatter, the road was approved by VDOT as safe for travel on Oct. 13. For the road to be open to the public, he said, a traffic light needs to be activated at the road’s southern terminus at Melbourne Road, and the barriers need to be removed.

Hatter pointed out the road was open briefly from mid-October to mid-November 2010 while work was performed on East Rio Road.

“We got it to a point where it could be traveled on while we did the major reconstruction work on East Rio [Road],” he said. “That’s not something that we usually do. But it allowed us to get the work done more quickly.”

During that time, Norris said, Charlottesville High School officials expressed concern for their students’ safety, as the road dumped a large volume of traffic in front of the school. Opening the road now, he said, wouldn’t fix any gridlock.

“It just moves the traffic problem elsewhere, it doesn’t solve it,” he said. “We’ve heard from the high school officials that when [the road] was open, they were very concerned about the safety of the students not just driving to school, but on the buses.”

Hatter said roads usually won’t see public traffic until after their final approval.

“We generally don’t open a project until it has been approved, which is basically VDOT’s way of telling the contractor, ‘Yes, you’ve completed the project to our satisfaction,’” he said.

Hatter declined to speculate on what effect a board resolution would have on VDOT opening the road.