‘We need these roads.’ Gulfport project moves forward to ease traffic at I-10, US 49
A contested road project in Gulfport now has a longer timeline and a larger budget, in part to address civil rights and environmental concerns.
The road project would add about two miles of road to alleviate congestion at Interstate 10 and Highway 49, one of Mississippi’s busiest interchanges. It won a $20 million grant from the federal Department of Transportation in 2019.
“We need these roads,” Hewes said in an interview last week. “We need this relief.”
But local environmental groups and some residents of Forest Heights, a historic African American neighborhood just south of the proposed road, have long worried that more development in the area could worsen the flooding they already experience during heavy rain events like Hurricane Ida.
On Tuesday, Gulfport’s city council passed a resolution accepting a project budget revised from about $32 million to $45 million. Some of the increased cost comes from a stormwater management system that wasn’t part of the original plan.
Under the original budget, the federal grant covered 63.5% of the project costs. That figure is now down to 45.5%, which means local funds will pay for over half the cost.
The revised grant agreement also increases preliminary engineering costs by about $500,000 “to address civil rights and environmental concerns.” And it pushes the obligation deadline back a year, from Sept. 30, 2021, to Sept. 30, 2022.
Under the plan, some new roadway south of I-10 and west of Highway 49 would cross a section of wetlands where developers have made multiple unsuccessful attempts to build over the years.
Environmental advocates say Gulfport’s original plan included scant detail on potential flooding and mitigation. City officials say they’re in the process of completing detailed mitigation plans and have shifted funds earmarked for engineering in order to provide answers to community members’ questions sooner rather than later.
Ward 3 Councilwoman Ella Holmes-Hines, whose district includes the site of the project, was the only council member to vote against the resolution.
Federal civil rights investigation
A federal civil rights investigation could change the project, though exactly how remains unclear.
The Coalition to Preserve and Protect Forest Heights — comprising several local organizations including the National Council of Negro Women and the Education, Economics, Environmental, Climate and Health Organization (EEECHO) — took their concerns about the road project to the federal government earlier this year with a letter to the Department of Transportation. On July 26, they got a response.
The investigation by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)’s Office of Civil Rights will focus on whether the road project “could create potential disparate, adverse impacts to the predominantly African American communities within and near the Project area” and whether Gulfport and the Mississippi Department of Transportation “provided inadequate public outreach and community engagement related to the Project.”
Hewes said he welcomes the investigation and an additional layer of oversight on the project.
“The more answers we can get, the better off we’re going to be and the better the project is going to be,” he said.
What the highway administration’s investigation entails or when it might end remain open questions.
“FHWA does not comment on pending Title VI investigations,” the agency said in a statement, referring to the part of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits racial discrimination in federally funded programs.
Robert Wiygul, an environmental attorney based in Ocean Springs, said it’s too early to try to predict the significance of the investigation.
“Based on the original complaint, they felt there was enough to go to the next stage,” he said. “That’s all that means. I don’t think the FHWA necessarily looks for intentional discrimination. They’re looking for whether there’s a disparate impact.”
A new road to address traffic issues
Hewes said alleviating congestion at the interchange has long been a priority for his administration.
The area has replaced downtown as Gulfport’s commercial hub. Along the axes of U.S. 49 and I-10 have sprouted a Walmart Supercenter, the outlet mall, a 600,000-square-foot shopping center, numerous hotels and a Home Depot, among many other strip malls, stores and restaurants.
On busy shopping days like Black Friday, the traffic is especially bad.
“People come here, we’re a tourist area,” Hewes said. “If they have difficulty getting in and out, they are going to go elsewhere. We want people to have a good experience. Part of that good experience is not getting stuck in traffic.”
The project would create a new overpass over I-10, more entry points for U.S. 49, and new access routes for the outlet mall, which currently has only one entrance and crosses a railroad track.
The new roads would create public access to about 380 acres of currently undeveloped land, the grant application said.
“With the interstate interchange in close proximity, this newly accessible commercial area would be primed for quick development,” the application says.
“Any time you put a road through, you can expect development to follow,” Hewes said.
Potential environmental impacts
The city’s application for BUILD grant money included a brief acknowledgment that the project could affect wetlands, but said “careful design will be performed” to reduce the area disturbed.
The application added that the city expected to mitigate disruption to wetlands by purchasing credits in “a nearby wetland bank.”
The Coalition’s letter to the Department of Transportation highlighted the application’s lack of detail on how the project could affect wetlands and flooding.
“It is flagrantly devoid of any consideration of exacerbated flooding and/or increased pollution exposures to the low income and/or minority residents that will be most adversely impacted,” the letter said.
Gulfport’s director of public works, Wayne Miller, said in an interview last week that the project would affect 66 acres of wetlands. That total doesn’t include wetlands that could be disturbed by future development along the new roads, but potential development is factored into the city’s environmental planning for the project.
Coast engineering firm Neel-Schaffer designed the project’s stormwater mitigation concept: a retention pond surrounded by a walking path.
Neel-Schaffer engineer Steve Twedt said the details of the pond, like its size and depth, are still being worked out.
To Hewes — who said community meetings in 2020 and 2021 have given residents the opportunity to weigh in and see environmental plans — it feels like the project’s opponents simply aren’t listening to the city’s assurances that the project won’t worsen flooding in North Gulfport.
“Because of preconceived notions, a lot of this falls on deaf ears,” he said.
To Ruth Story, co-director of EEECHO, Gulfport’s claims about community engagement ring hollow. The first public meeting on the road was held in September 2020, about 10 months after Gulfport won the federal BUILD grant.
“It was already like a done deal when they came to the community,” Story said. “They didn’t come to the community and say, this is what we’re thinking of, this is what we would like to do, what do you think about this idea, how will this affect you? No. When they came it was already: This is what we’re doing. We got the money.”
Regulatory hurdles left to clear
The road project, and the environmental plans in particular, still have regulatory hurdles to clear. After the completion of the designs, Twedt said, the city will hold a public hearing, hopefully sometime later this fall. If they’re able to complete the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process by the end of the year, they can apply for environmental permits starting in 2022.
The Clean Water Act requires developers to get a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to fill and develop wetlands. That process includes a public comment period and may include public hearings as well before the Corps decides whether to grant the permit.
Public works director Wayne Miller said the city’s biweekly meetings with the FHWA and other parties have recently included discussions of the project’s environmental implications. The civil rights investigation comes up, but not in great detail, he said.
“We just ask them what’s the status of the Title VI [investigation],” Miller said. “The state and federal guys tell us what they know.”
Ruth Story, of EEECHO, said she had not heard from the investigators since the July 26 letter.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has emphasized the importance of racial equity in transportation policy. He often talks about addressing the country’s long history of building transportation infrastructure that disproportionately hurts Black communities, like the Claiborne Expressway that cut through New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood in 1968, causing the decline of the “Main Street of Black New Orleans.”
In March, the Federal Highway Administration cited civil rights and environmental justice concerns when it told Texas to stop work on a Houston interstate expansion project that local leaders say would displace 1,000 families and worsen pollution.
This story was originally published September 8, 2021 at 5:50 AM.
