By Ray Reed
ray.reed@roanoke.com 981-3351

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Virginia and federal highway officials have reached a streamlined agreement to decide within 18 months whether environmental issues will allow truck-separated lanes and rail upgrades along Interstate 81.

It's the first time the Virginia Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration have made this type of agreement to study a project's environmental effect, the two agencies said Monday. They searched the nation for states that have made a similar pact but didn't find any, they said.

The environmental study will determine what I-81 will look like after it's widened, some 12 to 16 years from now.

Two builders' consortiums have proposed adding lanes. One group, Fluor Virginia, wants to add one lane in each direction. The other, Star Solutions, wants to add two separated lanes in each direction for trucks only. Both groups want to pay for the work by charging tolls.

Environmental issues control the decisions on whether either proposal can be done, VDOT says.

The streamlined approach sets out the ways VDOT, the federal agency and a consultant will work together to complete the study on time, said Jeffrey Southard, chief of planning and environmental issues at VDOT.

The absence of such agreements has caused delays when people who began a study left their agency before the task was complete, and their successors weren't aware of informal understandings that had been reached earlier in the process.

The environmental consulting firm will be Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc. of Watertown, Mass., with offices in Virginia. VHB is not affiliated with the Fluor or Star Solutions consortiums, and its work on I-81 will be coordinated by Chris Collins of VDOT's environmental division.

VDOT and the consultant will finish negotiating their contract by January, when VHB will begin the study, the agency said.

The lack of a final agreement made it difficult to define the scope of VHB's work Monday, but it will be a two-tier environmental impact study.

The first tier typically evaluates a highway corridor about 1,000 feet wide. In Tier 2, sites within the corridor are chosen for the road's alignment.

Before alignment is determined, a Tier 1 study looks at broad environmental issues, air quality, and land-use plans.

Tools VDOT and the consultant will use in Tier 1 include about 40 different environmental databases that identify such issues as wetland sites, endangered species habitats and underground storage tanks. Most of the Tier 1 work is done with computers using map-based software.

VDOT's goal is to complete Tier 1 by mid-2005, which is one-third the time normally required to get a record of decision from the Federal Highway Administration.

That's when Virginia will know if it can build truck-separated lanes on I-81 that would qualify for up to $1.6 billion in pilot-highway funds from the federal government. Even if I-81 qualifies for the federal funds, tolls still would be required because the truck-lanes proposal would cost $7.9 billion after inflation.

Tier 2 looks at more specific effects, and that's where the I-81 alignment could be affected by such issues as its proximity to historic sites, hiking trails and other recreational areas.

This will be Virginia's second attempt at a tiered environmental impact study. The first tried to find a corridor southwest of Washington, D.C., for an outer beltway, and that study was abandoned about two years ago because of public opposition.

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