No Route 3 In The Mountains!

Road Rage

The homegrown opponents of I-3 warn that destruction, development and nukes-on-wheels will roll down the controversial highway. Otherwise, they figure, it's a dandy idea.
By John F. Sugg
Published November 2, 2005
Creative Loafing, Gainesville

It looks like an out-of-place hump in a field on Ga. 17, just a few miles south of the ersatz Alpine tourist haven of Helen. A hump topped, of all things, by a little gazebo.

But the hump's more than a hump. It's an archeological treasure. The Nacoochee Mound is all that's left of the ancient Cherokee town of Gauxule, whose most famous visitor, conquistador Hernando de Soto, passed through in 1540. The gazebo came later.

And, now, for some - say, U.S. Rep. Charles Norwood, R-Augusta - the hump has become an annoyance, not so much for itself but because it's a symbol, a rallying point for ornery mountain constituents who aren't real fond of the six-term congressman nowadays.

That's because Norwood wants to dump a new highway near the Nacoochee Mound. Along with his Senate chums Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, Norwood is championing an interstate that they've informally dubbed "I-3" - an up to 1,000-foot-wide gash of concrete stretching 400 miles from Knoxville to Savannah. The quaint valley around the Nacoochee Mound, about midway along one of the proposed routes, would likely be changed forever.

Picture it: A right-of-way as wide as three football fields are long. Where lush valleys, breathtaking gorges, photogenic ridgelines, treasured historic sites and quaint hamlets now dominate the landscape, I-3 would bring the inevitable torrent of Waffle Houses, cookie-cutter motels and Wal-Marts. Instead of gold- and red-painted autumn trees, more of the South would be eternally asphalt black and concrete gray.

According to the originally announced route, the interstate would cut from eastern Tennessee along the western border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, bulldoze through two national forests, burst into Georgia near Blairsville, march south near Helen, threaten pristine areas near Unicoi Gap and Tallulah Gorge, exit the mountains on a course near Athens, and finally head for Augusta and Savannah.

William Tecumseh Sherman couldn't have found a more disruptive route to the sea.

In recent months, after protests mounted, that route has been removed from federal websites. Advocates say the highway could take another track through Georgia's mountains - as far west as Blairsville or as far east as Clayton - but it would be just as controversial.

Most of the advocates seem to inhabit congressional offices and corporate boardrooms. In two months of crisscrossing North Georgia, I didn't find a single "real person" who embraced the idea of a new interstate.

But I did find a lot of people who didn't know about the planned road. Rob Jones, for example, recently bought Turner's Corner, a 1928 vintage restaurant on U.S. 19/129 about 20 miles south of Blairsville. When I described I-3, Jones' response was, "Wow! I had no idea."

One of his employees, Greg Newton, had picked up reports about the road.
"Everyone I know will be real unhappy if it's built," Newton says. "I moved here from West Palm Beach just to get away from things like interstates. If it comes here, we're ruined."

That unpleasant scenario has mobilized hundreds of mountain residents. Each of the four affected states has its own coalition opposing the highway.
Meetings are standing-room only.

Georgia's Stop I-3 Coalition leader, Elizabeth Wells, says her group just needs to get the message out. "We don't hear people arguing that the road is a good idea," she says. "Our strategy is: not here, not in someone else's county, not anywhere."

Road advocates are feeling the heat. Norwood, who authored legislation equating the road to stand-up-and-salute patriotism, was quoted earlier this year saying, "It is critical that we begin [the interstate] as quickly as possible." Now, Norwood proclaims he's "neutral."

That might have something to do with the commissions of three counties in his district - Habersham, White and Rabun - voting to oppose I-3. A fourth county, Towns, is governed by a single commissioner, and all five candidates currently vying for the seat have vowed to say "no" to the interstate.

Chambliss, meanwhile, dodges meetings where he's likely to run into road opponents - he won't even send an aide. At an August meeting of the Stop I-3 Coalition, Chairwoman Wells moderated a panel of citizens and experts on the highway's impact. Alongside the panelists' chairs were two empty seats with name tags for Chambliss and Norwood.

"We want to hear their thoughts," Wells told me at the time. "But we're just common citizens, so I don't think they're interested."

Isakson's office didn't respond to requests for his opinion. According to activists and several North Georgia political leaders, the Republican senator at first followed the lead of his predecessor, rogue Democrat Zell Miller, a longtime advocate of development interests near his boyhood home in Towns County.
Recently, Isakson has hedged his bets, vowing to North Georgia leaders that if the people don't want that road, it won't be built. He, at least, has corresponded with the citizens' coalition.

The opposition comes from all directions - environmentalists, small mountain businesses and, primarily, local residents who treasure North Georgia for the refuge it provides from interstates, malls and hordes of people.

"You come here for the peace that surrounds you," says Wells, a psychologist who lives on a farm near Helen. She takes me to the Nacoochee Mound and, with a sweeping gesture toward nearby peaks, proclaims, "If an interstate was built one mile, or 10 miles or 20 from where you live, you couldn't avoid the destruction, the noise, the light. It would forever destroy the ambience of the mountains."

Among the assertions in Norwood's legislation is that economic manna will gush from the interstate. The anti-road activists scoff, proffering the federal government's very own studies that show interstates are no guarantee of prosperity for rural counties.

One federal study focused on South Georgia counties along I-16: Emanuel, Treutlen, Wilkinson and Twiggs. While Savannah and Dublin, both already economic hubs, did benefit from the interstate, the rural counties showed little impact.

"There is some speculation that in portions of these counties, the I-16 suppressed economic activity, either by facilitating retail activity outside the area that would otherwise remain in the county, by diverting through traffic from non-interstate highways, or by acting as a physical barrier to commerce," says Roger Williams, a White County carpenter who wrote a position paper for the Stop I-3 Coalition.

Says Wells, "It's just common sense. The interstate would draw business away from our local people."

Others are concerned about losing historic sites to the highway. Presumably, even the federal government would flinch at paving over an Indian mound. But it's likely that historic sites would be damaged, either directly from development or by degrading the rural character of the settings.

"You can't build a road like that without destroying so much that's irreplaceable history," says Tom Lumsden, a Cleveland physician better known in the mountains as a loquacious amateur historian.

But the road's most significant impact would be on the environment. I-3 opponents say more automobile traffic would bring more air pollution. And the only way through the mountains would be to blast new canyons. Wildlife habitats would be isolated; many would be destroyed. Rock in the Appalachians, when exposed to air and water, undergoes a chemical reaction that leaches acid into streams and lakes, sterilizing them.

"It would be an enormous scar on the landscape," adds D.J. Gergen, a lawyer with the Charlottesville, Va.-based Southern Environmental Law Center.

There is another side. Norwood's communications director, John Stone, says the interstate would be a horn of plenty for the Southeast, providing a long-needed north-south axis along the Georgia-South Carolina border. "You ever tried driving from Athens to Savannah?" he says. "It's deadly."

Travel to and from the port of Savannah would be enhanced by the interstate, he says. And the interstate would "save the mountain towns" by allowing travelers to reach their destinations more quickly.

He also argues that an interstate would bring more orderly growth because of the limited number of exits. He points to existing four-lane routes that don't have limited access - such as Ga. 316 between Gwinnett County and Athens. "What do you have on 316?" Stone asks. "An endless line of car dealers and strip malls. Sure, there's development on an interstate, but it's at the interchanges. The rest is preserved."

At least one Atlanta politician supports the road. "We're going to need it to ease congestion" in the metro area, state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, D-Atlanta, says. "It just makes sense."

The flip side of Brooks' rather hypothetical argument is that I-3 could pull metro Atlanta's sprawl even further into the countryside. A swath of Georgia would be sandwiched between I-285 and the new interstate. What tasty bait for developers!

And the argument that the road would ease congestion by diverting truck traffic sounds like wishful thinking. Atlanta's gridlock is caused overwhelmingly by cars. If you took the original route - basically a ruler line with some wiggles in it from Knoxville to Savannah - "you'd only save [about] 19 miles from existing routes," coalition leader Wells says. "That's not going to change conditions on existing roads."

I-3 could cost from $10 billion to $50 billion. If the federal government has that much money to spare, opponents reason, it should be spent on Gulf Coast reconstruction.

Who else supports the interstate? Big companies with lots to haul - Home Depot, Georgia Pacific, the Georgia Mining Association, Goody's Family Clothing - have declared their backing.

A senior Home Depot executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recast the old "what's good for General Motors is good for America" theme: "Sure, it would make our job a lot easier to have the interstate. That goes without saying. I think it would be great for the region's economy, and we're a big part of that economy."

Those reasons aren't insignificant. But in sum, do they add up to a compelling justification for spending mountains of taxpayer cash to flatten and rip apart many of the South's mountain treasures?

"Absolutely not!" fumes Wells, adding: "The big question, the only real question is 'Why? Why this road?'"

Some road foes offer a scary answer, which they suspect is true partly because of the mystifying route by which the proposed highway has gotten this far. They note that the push for the interstate first materialized 15 months ago, when the concept was presented by then-U.S. Rep. Max Burns, a Republican who lost his east-central Georgia seat last year to Democrat John Barrow.

Picking up Burns' mission, Norwood in January gave birth to the legislative baby, a bill that called for a study of the road to be completed by year's end. His legislation died in committee but was reincarnated as part of the massive (and pork-laden) transportation bill that finally made it through Congress in July.

The I-3 study is now underway. For the road actually to be built, Congress would have to approve construction, which presumably couldn't go forward without various impact studies and opportunities for public comment. Because the study was inserted into the legislation by Congress, however, the study for now bypasses the usual steps.

"We'll get to all of that," Norwood aide Stone promises.

Opponents worry that the study's a tactic to incubate the idea so that it gathers momentum by the time citizens are allowed to raise formal objections.

"One of the congressmen told me, wait until the study is completed and then voice our concerns," state Rep. Charles Jenkins, D-Cleveland, told an August Stop I-3 Coalition meeting of 400 people at White County High School. "I said, 'Bull!' You tell them up front what you want. We don't need it, folks."

Jenkins seemed a bit more pessimistic after the meeting. "We've got to fight the road and do what we can," he confided. "But I think it's going to be built. Too many powerful people want it."

I-3 certainly seems to have acquired a lot of quiet momentum already. The study originally was to have cost $400,000. As the transportation bill made its way through Congress, however, the appropriation rose to $1.3 million, pocket change by Washington's standards, but indicative that somebody cared.

Here's where we get to the scary part. Norwood's legislation lists economic development as the road's secondary objective. But the primary goal would be to link various military establishments in the South "in the strategic defense interests of the Nation."

Many reasons have been offered for the calamitous events in Iraq, but a lack of roads in Georgia does seem a bit of a stretch. "What we fear is that they'll just say, 'National security, national security' and push the road through no matter what the public wants," Stop I-3 leader Wells laments.

What may be the two most important defense installations along I-3's general path aren't even named in Norwood's legislation.

The route's northern terminus generally is described as Knoxville. It is ...
sort of. According to the initial route, the road actually would merge into Interstate 140, which leads straight toward Oak Ridge, a super-secret hub in the nation's nuclear bomb complex.

The other unnamed installation is the massive Savannah River Site near Augusta. It, too, is a hush-hush facility involved in a variety of nuclear projects, ranging from radioactive materials storage to the military's plans for a new generation of "mini-nukes."

Road opponents worry that I-3's true destiny lies in serving as a route to shuttle nuclear material back and forth between Tennessee and the Savannah River Site.

Norwood aide Stone derides the nuke talk. "It's a total fabrication," he says. "We have had no consideration of the subject. He just thought it up."

The "he" is John Clarke, a Hayesville, N.C., builder and raspberry grower who heads that state's anti-I-3 group. Clarke authored a report on the nuclear angle - admitting that much of it is hypothetical. Still, the circumstances bolster his case. For example, the federal government has had a difficult time finding permanent storage for nuclear waste. A planned storage site at Yucca Mountain, Nev., is beset with regulatory and legal problems. Stiff opposition also has greeted an alternative site 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. That could leave the Savannah River Site, which already is a temporary dump for highly toxic waste, as an all-but-permanent repository.

"Do we really want unmarked trucks driving through our mountain towns, carrying the most dangerous material in the world?" Clarke muses. "All it would take would be one accident."

Whatever the real reason that backers want to shove I-3 through the mountains, they're pushing every political button they can find to make it happen.

From the start, I-3 has been swaddled in the American flag. Interstate names actually must follow a numbering system that reserves the smallest odd numbers for north-south routes on the West Coast - I-5 in California, for example. But the "3" in I-3 is an honorary designation for the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, headquartered at Fort Stewart, which is near Savannah.

The law proposing the road declares that the unit's soldiers "sacrificed their blood and lives so that their fellow Americans can live in peace and freedom," and "seized ... Saddam Hussein's palaces." I-3 would honor the "professionalism, heroism, and sacrifice of the men and women of the [division] in defending their Nation's freedom."

In other words, only a craven running dog of Saddam and Osama bin Laden would oppose the highway. But independent-minded mountaineer opponents of the highway aren't buying that.

"I know that tactic," Clarke says. "Norwood likes to refer to us as a fringe group. But when I got interested in the road, I went to a meeting in Hiawassee. I thought there would be 20 people there. But there were more than 600 people, and half of them are loyal, staunch Republicans. Fringe? I don't think so. I'd call them mainstream."

http://www.johnsugg.com/2005/11/road_rage.html