news-record.com

GREENSBORO — Margaret Postels and her neighbors in Liberty Square want to make one thing clear about their neighborhood and the Greensboro Urban Loop.

The townhouse development, near Old Battleground Road and Cotswold Avenue, dodged a bullet. It won’t lose any of the nine homes once threatened by the last leg of the western loop — much of which could be on track for construction starting in 2014.

“We probably won’t even see it,” Postels said of the loop, noting it will be built downhill from the 25-home neighborhood in a small valley that should also lower noise from the new highway.

Residents of Liberty Square are among hundreds across a broad swath of Greensboro potentially affected by recent changes in the loop’s timetable.

The state Department of Transportation is planning a series of meetings to update residents, beginning Sept. 16 with one specifically for Liberty Square residents because the changes are so sweeping there.

Larger meetings likely will be held in October for all residents on the remaining western, eastern and northern legs of the loop.

The DOT recently completed a review of unfinished loop projects in nine cities across North Carolina. Two of Greensboro’s remaining three sections rank highly for action in the relatively near future.

About 25 miles of the loop’s 43-mile circuit have been built. The most recent leg opened about two years ago across southwest and west Greensboro to the airport area.

The new proposal calls for the last, western leg between Bryan Boulevard and Battleground Avenue to be under construction in four years and finished in 2017.

Road crews would build the eastern leg, from U.S. 70 north to U.S. 29 near Assembly Road, between 2017 and 2021.

The northern stretch from U.S. 29 to Lawndale Drive was left out of the newly proposed schedule, which suggests that leg won’t get going until 2021 or 2022, said Mike Mills, DOT’s division engineer for this part of the Triad.

DOT administrators reviewed loop construction statewide to rank projects more logically, based on factors such as which plans would solve the most traffic problems.

In Greensboro, that translated into reversing the order for building the western and eastern legs, but leaving the northernmost tier in limbo.

The new timetable means that people living along the yet-to-be-built western leg must face the disruption of highway construction in their backyards years ahead of initial projections.

Although the loop will cut across only a corner of Calvin Stanley’s 37-acre farm on Horse Pen Creek Road and leave most intact, it is land he inherited from his parents, land that has been in his family for at least three generations.

“If you have to lose it, I guess that’s about as good as it could be,” said Stanley, who has farmed there for 50 years. “I don’t know that you ever get enough money to make up for the aggravation.”

DOT has not approached him yet about selling that part of his property, so Stanley said he welcomes the upcoming meetings to get a better idea of what his future might hold.

The western route is all but set in concrete. Of about 22 properties needed to build it, half already are owned by public agencies including DOT, Piedmont Triad International Airport, Guilford County and the city of Greensboro. The publicly owned land, worth $4 million, includes large tracts on either end of the next leg for interchanges on Bryan Boulevard and Battleground Avenue.

Even along the northern route with construction at least a decade away, people are thirsty for detailed information from road planners about the project’s future.

“It’s more the people who live 50, 75, 100 feet from it. Those are the ones who are really concerned,” said Dan Acker, a resident of The Grande at Lake Jeanette neighborhood.

But other residents of The Grande will be grateful for any more light DOT can shed on the road’s design and construction schedule, Acker said. Neighborhood leaders delved heavily into the project last year until they decided DOT probably followed its rules correctly in denying The Grande sound barriers to muffle the future loop’s traffic noise.

They don’t necessarily agree that outcome is reasonable or fair, but adopted a wait-and-see approach knowing the northern leg isn’t imminent, Acker said.

The Grande at Lake Jeanette, like Liberty Square, was developed after DOT announced the loop’s basic route in the mid-1990s. DOT limits sound walls to neighborhoods in place when such a route is formally adopted.

Roadway planners apparently weren’t aware Liberty Square existed when they sought to preserve a natural drainage area by taking land that would have required demolition of six units, Postels said.

Planners were able to protect the stream by building a retaining wall nearby instead of taking the extra land, Mills said.

Similarly, city and state planners revised a proposed detour of the Atlantic & Yadkin Greenway across the loop to miss another part of Liberty Square threatened by the initial design.

The townhouse neighborhood off Old Battleground Road is technically on the western loop, which extends from the airport area to Lawndale Drive. But DOT plans to end that segment at Battleground Avenue, meaning the section near Liberty Square might not be completed for another decade when the road’s final leg is built, Mills said.

Those are the kinds of details residents all along the route will be eager to nail down in upcoming meetings with state and city highway planners. Mills said the meeting schedule will be announced soon.

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