Road block: Preservation lawsuit may block Highway 100 extension

CEDAR RAPIDS - “I'd like to have a house in this area, just to watch the seasons change,” said Elwood Garlock, standing near a dense grove of oak and cottonwoods on the edge of a meadow dotted with wildflowers.

It's the kind of Midwestern scene often glimpsed from behind the tinted glass of a speeding SUV - just what Garlock hopes to prevent happening to this spot.

The 69-year-old retired science teacher from Cedar Rapids was ankle-deep in the prairie grasses of the Rock Island State Botanical Preserve, 20 acres just west of Xavier High School and just off the path of a planned extension of Highway 100 from its present junction with Edgewood Road NW to Highway 30 southwest of the city.

Garlock is one of three plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed June 2 against the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration seeking to block the long-sought project on environmental grounds. The suit specifically claims the environmental study in support of the new route was deficient.

“Basically, they didn't do what's called due diligence,” said Garlock, who lives near Roosevelt Middle School.

It's the latest legal twist and potential roadblock in the decades-long saga.

“We've been working on this for 20 years,” said Linn County Supervisor Lu Barron, D-Cedar Rapids, also a member of the county conservation board. “The wheels move slow but we're still moving forward.”

The four-lane highway won't go through the state preserve, home to Blanding's and ornate box turtles and Byssus skipper butterflies, all classified as rare or endangered species in Iowa. The route, in the process of being located, will swing north around the fragile species' habitat and through the 100-acre Rock Island County Preserve.

As envisioned now, the route will pass north of the Xavier campus, parallel the divide between the Rock Island state and county preserves, cross the Cedar River south of the Iowa Northern (former Rock Island) railroad bridge, then turn south to intersect Highway 30 near its 16th Avenue SW interchange.

Planning continues despite the lawsuit.

“Could (the route) move 30 feet? Sure,” Cathy Cutler, planner at Iowa Department of Transportation's Cedar Rapids district office. “Could it move 300 feet? Probably not.”

But Garlock, political director of the Iowa Chapter of the Sierra Club, said a four-lane highway bordering a state preserve would substantially disrupt, if not ruin, the neighboring site. (The Sierra Club chapter and Linda Biederman of Marion are the other two plaintiffs in the lawsuit).

“It just doesn't belong here,” said Garlock.

Land donations

The Rock Island Railroad donated what's now the state preserve to Linn County in 1962. It remains county property, but its designation as a state preserve in the 1970s brought a higher protective status that all but rules out development.

State preserve status and the discovery of the rare species forced DOT planners to look north of the state preserve. A route through what was then private property could have put the new highway south of Doe Run Drive, on the southern edge of an upscale residential development accessed off Blairs Ferry Road.

But in early 2002 James Properties Inc. of Cedar Rapids, developers of the residential area, gave 100 acres north and west of the state preserve to the county conservation board. The board petitioned the State Preserves Advisory Board to include the 100 acres in the state system, effectively blocking the project.

A lawsuit filed by Cedar Rapids challenging the land donation was rejected, but as conservation board members' terms ended, Linn County supervisors replaced preserve supporters with members willing to accommodate Highway 100. The petition for state preserve status was withdrawn in early 2006.

State appropriations

Meanwhile, the state finally began appropriating money for the Highway 100 project, estimated last year to cost $120 million. There's currently $4.3 million in state money allocated for planning and property acquisition starting with the new state fiscal year July 1, and Cedar Rapids has earmarked $950,000.

The highway design will include features to mitigate its effect on the neighboring state preserve and its inhabitants, including a pond and a path under the highway for the Blanding's turtle, Barron said.

“They have a reasonably good plan for mitigating it, but you can't really mitigate (for) prairie plants, because their roots go 16 feet deep,” Garlock said.

Garlock and other critics continue to suggest the extension be shifted north to corridors off County Home Road or Tower Terrace Road, alternatives already rejected by the DOT.

“Each one of those was looked at, too,” said Allen Witt, head of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce task force on the highway project. “There's a huge park (Chain Lakes County Park) up there, a 300-acre park. It would go right through the middle of that and the river is very wide up there.”

Hope on both sides

Witt and other highway backers hope the latest lawsuit proves just a speed bump in the planning process.

“Six years from now we'll be driving on the first sections of the road,” Witt predicted. “We're not going to be discouraged by this.”

Garlock is hopeful, too.

“They've been reasonably successful in changing the paths of these roads somewhere else,” he said. “That's our hope.”