Federal cash sustains dream of freeway through Ala. woods

E & E Publishing ^ | December 23, 2015 | Sean Reilly

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

PINSON, Ala. -- At 8 a.m. on a Saturday, the rumble of bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment was already audible in Ardell Turner's modest home in this rural hamlet north of Birmingham.

Not far away, they once mined coal. Now state and local leaders are seeking prosperity through one of the nation's largest and priciest road projects.

On planners' maps, the Northern Beltline will be a 52-mile, six-lane interstate that will effectively complete a loop around Birmingham, Alabama's largest city. More than a half-century after the Beltline's conception, work on a small segment began last year within a mile of Turner's home. The estimated price tag for the entire highway is $5.3 billion, with completion expected in 2054. But to the business leaders and politicians who have doggedly pursued it for decades, the project is as essential as ever to spawning jobs and new business.

"It's not easy, it's not cheap, but most things in life that are worthwhile are not," said Renee Carter, executive director of the Coalition for Regional Transportation, a business advocacy group created in 2008 to promote the highway.

To the Beltline's detractors -- including a Colorado congressman who once dubbed it the "Alabama Porkway" and environmentalists waging a four-year legal battle to stop it -- the Beltline is the whitest of elephants, a taxpayer-funded gift to politically connected corporations that will damage local watersheds with no assurance of a payoff for the enormous investment. While local backers have christened the project "the road to jobs," Turner, a petite great-grandmother who has lived in the area for 65 years, preferred a different label: "a road to nowhere."

[Robert DeLong]

Yes, but that was built in stages wasn’t it. IN other words the road was constructed to a certain point, and then it was not picked up and continued for several years. I would think a beltway type of road system would be a continuous thing. Otherwise, only certain people would gain advantage of it and even then not completely as envisioned.