MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Monongalia County Republican Delegate Cindy Frich said, despite her concerns about one specific project in Monongalia County, she isn’t campaigning for or against the October 7 road bond election.
“I’m not telling people how to vote,” she said Thursday on Morgantown AM. “I’m just concerned more people aren’t aware that this is happening.”
Frich claims the citizens of the Baker’s Ridge area have not been properly informed of a potential $100 million I-79 connector providing additional access to the interstate for county residents. Those claims have been disputed by a number of local officials who say the project has been in the public eye since late 2015.
“It has yet to be designed,” Bill Austin of the Morgantown Monongalia Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) said Thursday on Morgantown AM.
That fact alone is why Austin, the Secretary and Executive Director on the MPO’s Policy Board, remains baffled by the criticism coming from Frich.
“When we did the modeling on it, we were thinking of it as a boulevard, which would access on it,” he added. “When we were doing the planning study on it, it would not be an interstate of any sort. It would be comparable to a four-lane with a median in some places, but there would be access allowed to it.”
He claims at no point did he tell Frich it would be a limited-access four-lane parkway or expressway.
“I was hoping for better information out there to folks before they voted,” Frich said. “And there are groups that know and are being spoken to.”
However, a number of local officials claim there isn’t “more information” to reveal because there has been no environmental impact statement. At best, Austin said, the proposed access project that has been dubbed colloquially by roads officials as the “West Run Expressway” remains years away from a shovel ever entering ground.
“Where we are with it is an environmental impact statement needs to be performed for the study,” Austin said. “It would look at potential corridors. The lines on the map we have are simply placeholders to give people an idea of the vicinity where it might be.”
The project, which at the time was considered one of several possibilities, has been the subject of several public meetings by the MPO dating back to 2015.
“People up here, most of them don’t know anything about it,” Frich said. “They don’t even know what an MPO is.”
Frich is in the process of attempting to coral a number of public meetings that would include DOT Secretary Thomas Smith and DOH District Engineer Don Williams in the Morgantown area. She sent out a hand written letter to local residents last week suggesting that this project could lead to the seizure of homes and the devaluation of property — a claim Bill Austin refuted.
“To say that any one person’s home would be taken is not really true,” Austin said. “That’s not to say that homes couldn’t be taken, but they would seek to minimize the impact to the neighborhood and homes.”
Early voting begins Friday on the $1.6 billion dollar road bonds vote. The general election is October 7.