Sullivan delays vote on 'Airport Parkway South'

BLOUNTVILLE — Citing lack of a consensus from a "citizens resource team" and a lack of priority ranking by local road planning agencies, the Tennessee Department of Transportation announced about eight years ago that a future possible project dubbed "Airport Parkway South" was being shelved.The potential new road — to create a new route to the Tri-Cities Regional Airport from the Highway 19-E/Highway 11-E intersection — drew heavy public opposition when initially discussed, in part due to its possible taking of homes and crossing of Boone Lake. TDOT officials said back then that its immediate focus in the area in question would be an extensive re-work of the 19-E/11-E intersection. That work is underway now. The public opposition to "Airport Parkway South" still exists, at least based on dozens of area residents who turned out Monday for the Sullivan County Commission meeting. Why were they there? The same reason a similar crowd showed up in early 2014: Some county commissioners want the county to send a message to TDOT to get back to planning the road — and to build it "in the near future." Commissioners Bob Neal, of Bristol, and Bill Kilgore, of Kingsport, are sponsors of this resolution. In March of last year, then-county commissioners Ty Boomershine, Roger Cox, and Moe Brotherton sponsored a similar resolution. That resolution cited a January 2014 vote by the Sullivan County Industrial Development Board described as supporting construction of the road, which the resolution stated "would provide a vital north/south link through Sullivan County and serve existing, as well as future, commercial and industrial development in Northeast Tennessee." But the county's industrial development board and the county commission aren't the bodies TDOT said it would want to hear from to at some point in the future to revisit the issue. In March 2007 TDOT officials said the decision not to proceed with the project was based mainly on the lack of a consensus from a citizens resource team that studied several proposed routes for the proposed road. A secondary factor TDOT officials cited back then was an absence of the project on priority lists from metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and a regional planning organization (RPO) that serve the region. "At this point in time, based on the recommendation from the Citizens Resource Team — and in absence of high-priority recommendations from the MPOs and the RPO — (then Tennessee Transportation Commissioner Gerald Nicely) was deciding to not proceed with the project with the exception of the interchange improvements at Highways 19-E and 11-E," a TDOT spokesman said at the time. "That in no way canceled the project, in terms of saying it's no longer ever going to happen. That was our position ... and that's our position today. We are not going to pursue the project until we receive — through the channels that we normally get priorities set, the MPOs and the RPO — that this is a high priority." The latest resolution asking the Sullivan County Commission to request TDOT to "initiate the remaining planning stages and proceed with the construction of State Route 357 in Sullivan County in the near future" was listed as old business and up for a vote on the commission's agenda Monday. After multiple members of the public rose to speak against the road, Neal asked that the resolution be "rolled" to the commission's August agenda.