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GREENSBORO — Residents of Liberty Square Townhomes successfully dodged one threat from the Greensboro Urban Loop but still could lose part of their complex to a related walkway.

State highway officials announced this week they retooled the loop to miss three buildings that back up to what’s now Cotswold Avenue, where the eastbound lanes of the interstate bypass will go some day.

But the fate of a three-unit building around the corner remains uncertain because it sits in the right of way for a pedestrian bridge taking the Lake Brandt Greenway over the future highway.

“It was a total shock to me,” said Loretta Williams, who lives in one of the units threatened by the bridge.

“We were all worried about the other buildings backing up to Cotswold,” said Williams, whose town house is bordered by the greenway along Old Battleground Road. “No one said anything to us about this other thing.”

Road designers in Raleigh hope they can rework the bridge to avoid the town houses, but they haven’t settled on a workable alternative yet, said Mike Mills, the state Department of Transportation’s division engineer for the Greensboro area.

“We’re looking at all options,” Mills said.

Highway designers avoided the three buildings along Cotswold Avenue by adding a 220-foot-long retaining wall, which helps control drainage without requiring as much roadside land as the original design.

While the loop itself will miss the three Cotswold Avenue buildings, they will be fairly close to the highway. Travel lanes will be about 60 feet away at one end of the complex and roughly 80 feet at the other, Mills said.

But the road will be built in a slight valley, about 15 feet below the town houses, which should reduce traffic noise, Mills said.

Residents are glad the six town houses in those three buildings won’t be taken, but are concerned that information about the loop’s impact on their neighborhood keeps coming out in drips and drabs.

“Why don’t they tell everybody everything immediately?” asked Debbie Jones, who has lived in Liberty Square since last summer.

She learned about the retaining wall saving the three Cotswold buildings last week, before it was announced publicly, by calling developer Keystone Group and pretending to be an interested home buyer, Jones said.

Residents shouldn’t have to play games to learn the fate of their neighborhood, Jones said.

Another resident, Margaret Postels, said DOT should be able to shift the walkway away from the threatened building because there appears to be plenty of room on the other side of Old Battleground.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Postels, who has lived in Liberty Square since late 2007.

Three sections of the loop remain to be built from Bryan Boulevard in western Greensboro, across the city’s northern tier to U.S. 70 on the east. The construction schedule is in limbo now, because DOT is evaluating all such loop projects statewide.

But local officials hope the western segment past Liberty Square can be under construction within a decade.

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com