BURLINGTON — Construction can begin on the Champlain Parkway, a federal judge ruled Friday, although the legal battle continues.
Burlington can now start clearing trees and installing a new stormwater system along the long-dormant strip that is slated to host the South End street.
But city officials still must contend with an ongoing lawsuit that asserts the project will harm the environment and a racially diverse neighborhood. The project is due back in court by early August — well before 2023, when city officials estimate they would start laying down asphalt.
Friday’s decision by Judge Geoffrey Crawford of U.S. District Court in Vermont followed an order Tuesday that temporarily halted the road’s construction. Crawford issued the first order in response to a court filing from the parkway’s opponents, who argued that construction shouldn’t start while their lawsuit is pending.
To meet the legal standard for pausing the project, the parkway’s opponents — called the Friends of Pine Street or Pine Street Coalition — needed to prove that the city’s construction plan would cause “irreparable harm” to natural areas along the planned route.
After listening to each side in a Friday morning hearing, Crawford ruled that the opponents did not meet that standard, meaning the city can begin to clear trees and install the stormwater system.
Crawford said the planned construction would not cause “irreparable harm” to trees in the parkway’s path because they can be replaced by new ones with relative ease.
“The loss of some trees in an urban setting which was already cleared once for the purpose of building a road does not constitute an irreparable environmental harm,” the judge wrote in his eight-page decision.
The stormwater system, meanwhile, represents a benefit, and not a harm, Crawford said.
“Constructing facilities to improve water quality in an impaired stream is a positive development from anyone’s perspective,” Crawford wrote. “There is no evidence that they will degrade the water quality. And they can always be removed.”
But while he sided with the city on Friday, Crawford sharply criticized city officials in his decision, suggesting that they misled the coalition and the court about when they would start construction.
Crawford said the parkway lawyers “left the court at least with the mistaken impression” that a hearing on stopping the parkway could wait until August.
“In fact, the project went out to bid, important deadlines are close to expiring, and the defendants are moving forward in earnest with the middle phase of the project,” Crawford said.
With the go-ahead from Crawford, the city will begin construction on Monday, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger said.
The Democratic mayor, who has overseen the long-stalled project during his decade at the helm of City Hall, emphasized that the upcoming construction would improve water quality in nearby Lake Champlain.
“This will remove about a ton of phosphorus every year from falling into Lake Champlain,” Weinberger told reporters after the Friday morning hearing.
In their lawsuit, the Pine Street Coalition objected to multiple aspects of the parkway’s design. Chief among their concerns, they say, is that sections of the project have not undergone environmental review for more than a decade. Since then, environmental regulations have become stricter, and more vegetation has sprouted up on the land that’s supposed to become the parkway.
In addition, the coalition says, conventional wisdom about the need for new roads such as the parkway has changed since the overall project was first proposed in 1965.
“If someone had designed a car based on 1965 technology, the federal government wouldn’t let them put it on the road today, because it would no longer be safe,” Cindy Hill, a lawyer representing the coalition, told reporters after the hearing.
Instead of the parkway, the coalition and other groups have offered their own vision of a South End roadway, dubbed the “Champlain RIGHTway.”
The RIGHTway would largely follow the same route as the parkway, save one stretch between Flynn and Lakeside avenues. The alternate route would also create a new spur sending traffic from Pine to Battery Street, instead of through the densely populated King and Maple neighborhood.
Hill told reporters that the coalition has tried to reach a settlement in their suit that would implement the RIGHTway, and not the Champlain Parkway, but city lawyers have declined.
Still, while the city hasn’t opted to change the road’s design, it plans on constructing the spur from Pine to Battery — named the “Railyard Enterprise Project” — to alleviate the equity and safety concerns around directing traffic into the King and Maple neighborhood, which has proportionally more people of color than other parts of the city.
The project would be 90% paid for by state and federal governments with a ceiling of $20 million in grants, according to a deal the city negotiated with state officials. It is currently in a preliminary design phase, and officials expect to announce the project’s exact route within months, the mayor said Friday.
For now, though, city leaders say the parkway has cleared a huge milestone in its five-plus-decade history — even as the lawsuit against it remains unresolved.
“There’s a real risk that if the city is not allowed to proceed … literally decades of work leading up until now could be lost,” Weinberger told reporters on Friday. “That would have very negative transportation impacts on the South End.”
