Family in legal, financial limbo waiting on beltway
“In the mid-1980s, the state proposed building a loop around the northern end of Winston-Salem, a stretch of road similar to roads ringing other N.C. cities. Ours, the cleverly named Northern Beltway, was to be divided into two legs, eastern and western.
The eastern leg would connect U.S. 52 to U.S 311 and be part of a superhighway running from Iowa to Myrtle Beach. The western would have ended at U.S. 158. It was supposed to have been the first leg built, and when proposed in 1988, was estimated to cost $135 million. Now, it’d cost upwards of $455 million.
(If started today, which it won’t be, the eastern leg would cost more than $850 million.)
Delays were caused on two fronts.
First, a lawsuit that called the government out for cutting corners on its own environmental safeguards was filed in 1999 and wasn’t resolved until 2010. Secondly, the state didn’t budget enough to build it.
The two legs of beltway crossed some 2,400 pieces of property; buying land would cost millions. The legal challenge held things up, and what money had been budgeted went elsewhere.
Along the way, the Northern Beltway plummeted down an arbitrary list ranking road projects DOT hoped to begin by 2020 — a wish list, really, because the state wasn’t going to budget money to build them anyway. That list, published in summer 2010, ranked the eastern leg dead last among 21 projects and the western leg ranked 16 th .
The net effect of all those machinations is that the people with real skin in the game – the property owners whose land sits in the path of the road — were stuck. They couldn’t sell or develop their land and the state stopped buying large tracts.”
Sexton, Scott. Winston-Salem Journal 19 January 2014.