Supervisors pass resolution in support of naming Meadowcreek Parkway after John Warner

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors has passed a resolution in support of naming its portion of the Meadowcreek Parkway after former Senator John Warner (R-VA). However, the motion offered by Supervisor Dennis Rooker (Jack Jouett) stated that the County will not rename the road the John Warner Parkway unless the City of Charlottesville follows suit for their portion.

Former Albemarle County Supervisor Forrest Marshall appeared before the Board to make his case, continuing his campaign to name the parkway after his old friend. This time he offered more details about Warner’s attempts to keep the National Ground Intelligence Center in the community, and praised Warner for helping to secure funds for Scottsville’s levee system to prevent catastrophic floods. Marshall said the renaming has the support of Butch Davies, the Culpeper District’s representative on the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB).

Before voting on the resolution, Rooker asked County Attorney Larry Davis to describe who has the authority to name a road. Davis replied that the City and the County have the ability to name a secondary road, like the Meadowcreek Parkway, without seeking approval from any other agency. However, naming rights for the City’s interchange at the Route 250 Bypass are reserved by the Commonwealth Transportation Board because it is classified as a primary road project. The City can request the CTB to choose a specific of name, but the rules dictate the interchange cannot be named after a living person without approval of the General Assembly.

Rooker called the request appropriate given that Warner’s role in securing the $27 million earmark for the interchange allowed the project to move forward. However, Rooker said that people don’t tend to notice if interchanges are named.

Before the vote, Chairman David Slutzky (Rio) urged caution against unilateral action without communicating to the City that their input is required as well.

“There’s been some sensitivities with the City residents about the construction project in the first place and I wouldn’t want to do anything that is too proactive,” Slutzky said. “We’re in effect suggesting that this name is acceptable to us and that we embrace it but we’re not actually adopting it until such time as the City were to decide that they to thought it was an appropriate name for their portion.”

After the vote, Marshall returned to the podium to thank the Board for their support.

Sean Tubbs

Comments

[stratton salidis]

I think the Warner Porkway is a more fitting name. If built, it will benifit only the sprawl developers of 29 north. For a look at who's pushing this project, google the Free Enterprise forum, check out the board of directors and where they own land. If Mr Warner knew all the details of how this road has come along, he may not feel so honored.

The city is planning to use Federal funds to build an Interchange to link the Meadowcreek Parkway (technically called Mc Intire Rd Extended within Charlottesville) to Rt. 250 while seeking to avoid the application of section 4f, 106 and NEPA to the state funded Parkway itself by segmenting these into separate, “independent” projects.

It should be noted that the Parkway itself was a federally funded project until these very laws proved prohibitive. Without the interchange the Parkway would end 775 ft away from rt. 250 in a field. As a rule, if Federal funds are needed for a project to be functional, Federal laws apply to the whole project. Sen. Warner was told by City Council member David Brown and other local luminaries that there was "broad consensus" (public hearings show the opposite, but Brown choose to heed the results of the local sprawl industry’s Free Enterprise forums push poll instead) for the Parkway if only he could get federal funding for a grade- separated interchange. Now the pro-parkway crowd is claiming that Charlottesville had agreed to build the 17 lane at-grade intersection before money for the interchange came along. This is a re-writing of history, as anyone who cares to look at the Charlottesville’s stated requirements for the road would plainly see.

How can our pro – Parkway councilors (Brown, Taliaferro and Huja) call themselves “green” while spending Charlottesville’s scarce transportation dollars on a road through its central park and Downtown in the age of climate change and war for oil? How is meaningful citizen involvement possible when the plans are deliberately based on false assumptions by our own officials as a means of misleading the public and subverting the law?

Is the press in this town lazy, and willing to repeat whatever they’re told, or just too fond of selling full page ads for car lots and exclusive sprawl developments?

Are we done with “urban renewal” and freeways thru cities, or have these mechanisms evolved a more subtle face and pace?

How about a Meadowcreek nature preserve and Bikeway instead? The land is pretty much bought; all we have to do is cut the road part out. The right thing to do costs less than destroying our greenspace. How about effective, convenient, comfortable transit people want to use? Isn’t this what we say we are about?