Frederick Road funding: Blame Obama?

This blog enjoys a broad geographic readership, so I don't often focus on issues specific to the Auburn-Opelika area.

But sometimes, it seems appropriate to do so.

Case in point: The Opelika-Auburn News reported Feb. 23 that federal officials have recalled funding for a major road widening project on Frederick Road, a commercial/residential corridor linking Auburn and Opelika.

This is a big, big deal in our cities.

The economic downturn has slowed our growth somewhat, but it has been clear for a long time -- going on 20 years -- that the residential nature of Frederick Road would be changing and the road would need to be widened.

The portion to be expanded lies mostly on the Opelika side of the city boundaries, so Mayor Gary Fuller and Opelika city councilors have zeroed in on the project for some time.

The newspaper pondered in an editorial whether the Frederick Road project is truly a priority for Opelika's municipal leaders. After all, the editorial said, the retail gem that is the TigerTown complex seems to do just fine with the congested road the way it is.

That seemed to strike a nerve with Fuller. In his written response to the editorial, he blamed the federal government, especially President Obama, for the loss of the funds. Congress couldn't get together on a transportation bill, he wrote, "because all they could talk about in Washington was health care."

Well, yes, health care has taken a lot of time and effort. But even if a transportation bill had been passed, there is no assurance that the money for this project would be in it. So that's a red herring.

The editorial made a legitimate point: If it has been the city's priority all this time, why hasn't there been more progress? Why didn't they start the project sooner?

A reader who identified himself only as "Yancey36" pointed out the reason in the comments below Fuller's response. From the April 25, 2008 edition of the Opelika-Auburn News:

When the Frederick Road project was planned more than 10 years ago, the section of road from the Auburn city limits to Enterprise Drive was to be widened from two lanes to four lanes with a raised median.

About four weeks ago, however, Fuller instructed city administrators to redesign the final leg of Frederick Road without a median. The design change is expected to delay the project.

On Thursday, city officials were told they will need to update the road-widening project’s environmental impact statement following the design change, Fuller said Friday afternoon.

Federal funding for the project, however, is still in place, Fuller said. “We don’t anticipate it changing,” Fuller said of the project’s main source of funding.

As you know, I used to work in the Florida House of Representatives. It just so happens that I once worked on a constituent case with a business owner who was unhappy about Department of Transportation plans to construct raised medians along a state road in our district. The medians, he argued, would hurt his business.

I talked with the engineers who designed the plans. We looked at the traffic history. The engineer explained to me how raised medians encourage predictable traffic flow and discourage accidents caused by right-of-way incursions -- accidents, he said, that tend to be high-impact and high-injury.

I tried to explain to the business owner that motorists' safety, not his clients' convenience, was the ultimate concern of the DOT. He didn't like it, but the project went forward as originally planned.

And his business did fine.

Back to our local issue: It was the same story with Frederick Road. Business owners in the area were unhappy with the idea of raised medians restricting access to their properties. They complained to the mayor.

In placating them by ordering the redesign, Fuller gambled with the federal funding.

And he lost.

To be fair -- and Fuller even said this at the time he ordered the redesign -- city officials didn't anticipate the funding situation to change, especially so negatively. As a state transportation official told a News reporter, this is the first time in his experience that the department has had such a great loss in funding.

But that's the point the News made in its editorial: If something is truly a priority, you move on it as soon as you can. You go forward in the best interests of the greatest number of people; you don't delay it because of dissatisfaction of a relative few.

No matter how noisy -- or influential? -- they are.