Updated at 2:57 p.m.
Decades after it was first pitched, Burlington’s Champlain Parkway got a big boost this week when a federal judge ruled in favor of the roadway project in an environmental lawsuit.
Judge Geoffrey Crawford of the U.S. District Court in Burlington on Tuesday granted a motion for summary judgment from the defendants in the case: the Federal Highway Administration, the Vermont Agency of Transportation and the City of Burlington.
The plaintiffs in the case, a group of residents called Friends of Pine Street, also requested summary judgment in the case, a motion Crawford denied.
Mayor Miro Weinberger, who was also a defendant in the case, celebrated Crawford’s decision, calling the parkway a “generational improvement to Burlington’s public infrastructure.”
“After 34 years of misguided designs and delays, with this decision by Federal Judge Geoffrey Crawford the City now has (a) path to complete and open the Champlain Parkway within a year,” Weinberger wrote in an emailed statement. His office later clarified a “key middle section” would be opened on that timeline.
Burlington public works director Chapin Spencer said in an email Wednesday that he expects “a substantial portion of the Initial Construction Contract to be completed this season with full completion by mid-2024. The full project is still planned to be completed by 2027.”
Cindy Hill, an attorney for Friends of Pine Street, could not immediately be reached on Wednesday.
The concept of the Champlain Parkway has been around since the mid-1960s, when a four-lane highway near the waterfront was planned. But obstacles persisted, and the end of the Interstate 189 highway was abandoned.
State and city officials revived the project in recent years, aiming to link the I-189 freeway with Pine Street. Separately, Burlington also hopes to add the Railyard Enterprise Project, which would add a new bypass road over a railyard to connect Pine and Battery Streets. City officials hope the railyard project will move traffic away from the neighborhood around Maple and King streets.
Parts of the lawsuit have centered on an argument that the parkway would disproportionately impact the Maple/King neighborhood, which is a racially diverse area of the city.
While temporarily halted last summer, the project was eventually allowed to proceed. Construction crews have been a constant presence, working on portions of a new roadway in the city’s South End.
Both sides argued their case in front of Crawford during a hearing in federal court in Burlington on May 12. Hill argued that the combined impact of the parkway construction and the railyard bypass, which is considered by the federal highway administration to be a separate project, requires a new environmental review.
But Benjamin Weathers-Lowin, an assistant U.S. attorney arguing on behalf of the Federal Highway Administration, said the railyard project was still only “conceptual” and that the rest of the parkway has been permitted and reviewed — and that construction was already underway.
In his decision, Crawford agreed with Weathers-Lowin, writing, “That the (Railyard Enterprise Project) lives on as a potential project in the future does not render it interdependent on the Parkway.”
Fortieth Burlington, owner of the Innovation Center office building on Lakeside Avenue, joined the suit as an intervenor. Its attorney, David Ries, argued that the parkway would bring a 36% increase in traffic on Lakeside Avenue during rush hour. That traffic data was part of an argument by Ries and Hill that the environmental review done for the parkway had become “stale” and that a supplemental environmental review should be done.
Crawford disagreed, saying that the additional review was not needed.
Hill also argued about “environmental justice” and the impacts to the Maple/King neighborhood, specifically saying that its residents did not have enough opportunity for public input and that those blocks would experience added traffic and noise.
But Weathers-Lowin argued the government held enough meetings, and that with the addition of new traffic signals along that area of Pine Street the congestion would actually improve once the parkway is completed.
Crawford, agreeing with the defendants, called Hill’s argument “a little over-heated” and said the changes to the north end of Pine Street were “relatively modest.”