NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release:  May 12, 1998

Contact:    Rob Kennedy, 608- 251-9164, New Transportation Alliance
                  Dave Cieslewicz, 608-259-1000, 1000 Friends of Wisconsin
                  Susan Mudd, 414-271-7280, Citizens for a Better Environment
                  Pam Porter, 608-251-7020, Wisconsin's Environmental Decade

State environmental leaders today criticized the Wisconsin Department of Transportation's (WisDOT's) new draft, 20-year State Highway Plan (SHP).  The plan calls for almost 3,000 new lane miles and costs $6.2 billion more than existing highway spending levels.  The environmentalists today called the plan fundamentally incomplete on two key counts and its issuance at this time as irresponsibly premature.

 "We just raised the gas tax last year to fund highway expansions and it would take another 7-10 cents per gallon to pay for this one," said Rob Kennedy, State Coordinator of the New Transportation Alliance.   "When does it stop?  Why doesn't the plan tell us how we are going to pay for three times more highway lane miles than under current spending without squeezing out needed improvements in local roads, transit, and rails?"  Kennedy also criticized the plan because "it fails to estimate the highway plan's most important environmental impact--that is, secondary land use impacts or sprawl."

"We're recklessly transforming the Wisconsin landscape with these massive highway building projects," said Dave Cieslewicz, director of the citizens land use group, 1,000 Friends of Wisconsin.  "Expanding highways is like loosening your belt to solve a weight problem.  It doesn't work.  It only creates more congestion, ugliness, and sprawl.  It's time to take a breather and consider how this expensive highway construction will change the Wisconsin landscape.  We don't want to become Illinois."

During the last budget session the Joint Finance Committee passed a four-year freeze on the enumeration of new highways that was ultimately vetoed by the Governor.  Environmentalists are calling on WisDOT, the Governor, and the state legislature to pass a similar freeze.  Says Kennedy: "We need to stop and think this over more carefully.  It's not enough to pay lip service to the DOT's old long range Translinks 21 plan gathering dust on a shelf.  We need an effort that equals the one behind this highway plan that instead produces a mid-term multimodal transportation plan.  This plan should outline how we are going to start actually funding improvements in transit, local roads, disabled transportation, and rails over the next few years--and not just highways."

Other concerns expressed by environmentalists include:
 

• Uses Up Multimodal Funds:  The SHP presumes that flexible (multimodal) funds from the federal government will mostly go to the state highway program and not to projects like Amtrak;
• Low Safety Emphasis:  The SHP puts too little priority on our number one highway improvement concern, safety, for most of the state trunk highway system, especially two-lane state trunk highways.  Capacity improvements, especially for the Major Highway Program, are emphasized instead.
• Misleading Analysis of Emissions:  The SHP takes credit for hoped-for improvements in fuel efficiency that have nothing to do with the plan but ignores the increased driving and emissions generated by the plan's proposed highway expansions and associated sprawl development.