George Hartzman and Zack Matheny’s answers to The Piedmont Partnership’s Candidate Survey Question #8 on the Urban Loop.

8.  Completion of road projects, such as the Urban Loop, is of critical importance in our community. What are your thoughts on financing options our community should pursue?

 

 

Zack:  “I will consider all options such as working with the state, and toll roads. The city in the past has worked with the state on major thoroughfares to lend money and be paid back to build infrastructure.”

 

http://www.greensboropartnership.com/government-affairs/elected-officials/Surveys/ZackMatheny.pdf

 

 

George:  “I believe the northern Urban Loop’s current planned route should be routed north or cancelled, now that the DOT recently increased projections of 72,000 cars a day driving through, and studies have found noise levels much higher than advertized.

 

I see the need for industrial traffic to access 40 east off of 29, but now that expected traffic levels have materially increased as neighborhoods were allowed to be (what many believe) negligently overbuilt on the route through northern Greensboro, we need to rethink the northern section of the Urban Loop.

 

From the negative response from neighborhoods along the southern route, the decision makers may be underestimating potential reactions.

 

Borrowing to lend to a financially strapped N.C. state government to purchase properties seems like an extremely bad idea that could create artificial distortions in the local property market that may benefit a few with influence at the expense of many.”

 

http://www.greensboropartnership.com/government-affairs/elected-officials/Surveys/GeorgeHartzman.pdf

George Hartzman and Zack Matheny’s answers to The Piedmont Partnership’s Candidate Survey Question #8 on the Urban Loop.

8.  Completion of road projects, such as the Urban Loop, is of critical importance in our community. What are your thoughts on financing options our community should pursue?

 

 

Zack:  “I will consider all options such as working with the state, and toll roads. The city in the past has worked with the state on major thoroughfares to lend money and be paid back to build infrastructure.”

 

http://www.greensboropartnership.com/government-affairs/elected-officials/Surveys/ZackMatheny.pdf

 

 

George:  “I believe the northern Urban Loop’s current planned route should be routed north or cancelled, now that the DOT recently increased projections of 72,000 cars a day driving through, and studies have found noise levels much higher than advertized.

 

I see the need for industrial traffic to access 40 east off of 29, but now that expected traffic levels have materially increased as neighborhoods were allowed to be (what many believe) negligently overbuilt on the route through northern Greensboro, we need to rethink the northern section of the Urban Loop.

 

From the negative response from neighborhoods along the southern route, the decision makers may be underestimating potential reactions.

 

Borrowing to lend to a financially strapped N.C. state government to purchase properties seems like an extremely bad idea that could create artificial distortions in the local property market that may benefit a few with influence at the expense of many.”

 

http://www.greensboropartnership.com/government-affairs/elected-officials/Surveys/GeorgeHartzman.pdf

Zack Matheny on zoning and Painter Boulevard/Urban Loop/Interstate

“I do not recall a case I voted on where I was intimately knowledgeable about the Urban Loop,” City Council member Zack Matheny said of the two years he served on the city’s Zoning Commission before his election to the council.

Scores of homes built in blacktop bull's-eye

Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record 

Zack Matheny on zoning and Painter Boulevard/Urban Loop/Interstate

“I do not recall a case I voted on where I was intimately knowledgeable about the Urban Loop,” City Council member Zack Matheny said of the two years he served on the city’s Zoning Commission before his election to the council.

Scores of homes built in blacktop bull's-eye

Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record 

George Hartzman, City Council District 3 Candidate Urban Loop and "Pay to Play" Campaign Flyer.

Hartzman for District 3 Urban Loop Flyer, August 28, 2009

Please feel free to print, email and/or distribute.

Urban Loop

City officials want to know if they can speed the Urban Loop toward completion by lending the state about $30 million.

 

The loan could come from unspent bond funds that voters approved...

 

The state would be asked to repay the loan with interest.

 

State government is facing huge budget deficits…

 

If the City of Greensboro’s budget cut police training, suspended its 25-year-old Bookmobile service to 67 daycares, and saved $3.2 million by cutting jobs and eliminating merit pay for city staff, why would who want to lend what % of the city’s reserves to a state with a $4.5 billion deficit, to purchase who’s real estate for how much for when?

 

The council discussion Monday focused on using the city money for advance land acquisition. …others were wary about making deals with a cash-strapped state government.

 

“Even if we have it in writing that the state would pay us back, the state is looking at a major shortfall. Is it possible they could renege on that? I’m not against it, I am just saying. Do we want to put ourselves out there?’”

 

Councilwoman T Dianne Bellamy-Small

 

City may loan DOT $30 million for Urban Loop

Amanda Lehmert and Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record

On A-weighting noise measurement and the proposed Urban Loop

He who wishes to deceive will never fail to find willing dupes

 

Niccolo Machiavelli

 

A-weighting, though originally intended only for the measurement of low-level sounds, is now commonly used for the measurement of environmental noise and industrial noise, as well as when assessing potential hearing damage and other noise health effects at all sound levels...

 

…the use of A-frequency-weighting is now mandated for all these measurements, although it is badly suited for these purposes, being only applicable to low levels so that it tends to devalue the effects of low frequency noise in particular.

 

A-weighting

Wikipedia

Why would who want some neighborhoods to believe Urban Loop noise won’t be more than advertized?

…Highway planners use badly flawed techniques...

 

…the “A-weighting” scale used by officials to rate traffic noise…developed in the 1930s…ignores huge volumes of sound, the kind of low-frequency rumbling from trucks that pierces walls like they aren’t even there.

 

…State DOT doesn’t dispute that the A-scale misses lower-frequency sound.

 

…Daniel Maguire, a well-known noise expert… found…A-weighting as an arbitrary system never meant to be applied in the way federal authorities now use it.

 

Numerous studies show that low-intensity noise is at least as disruptive and potentially harmful to health as higher tones, he said.

 

Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record

On Urban Loop Noise, and what some northern Greensboro neighborhoods are not being told

It is difficult to get a man to understand something

when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

 

Upton Sinclair

 

Local scientist studies the Urban Loop’s noise patterns

\

 

…Highway planners use badly flawed techniques to decide who is eligible for such noise protection.

 

The holes in those techniques became the focus of [Arthur] Ihrig’s months-long quest to understand how the loop — 200 feet from the house he bought in 1973 — could be so loud but not merit noise protection.

 

He found the “A-weighting” scale used by officials to rate traffic noise ignores huge volumes of sound, the kind of low-frequency rumbling from trucks that pierces walls like they aren’t even there.

 

That technique is based on a format developed in the 1930s , the A-scale, that aims to categorize the general human response to different levels of sound.

 

“I think they (highway officials) are using bad science,” Ihrig said. “It’s not valid in a situation like this, where you have extremely loud noise with lots of low-frequency sound.”

 

“He is absolutely right,” said Daniel Maguire, a well-known noise expert based in Indiana. “What they (officials) are saying is, 'We don’t give a rip about low-frequency noise.’ Yet because it’s a highway, that’s the thing they should be most concerned about.”

 

The Greensboro retiree’s findings also resonate with Charles Bruckner, Tar Heel representative of the New York-based advocacy group Noise Free America.

 

“The A-weighting scale doesn’t do anything for the lower end of the (noise) spectrum that carries farthest and actually penetrates walls,” said Bruckner, a Garner resident.

 

...when [Ihrig] switched to another measuring scale, the reading jumped [from 25] to 50 decibels, about the sound level of a nearby clothes dryer, which Ihrig felt was more realistic. The incident shows how lower tones missed by A-weighting can penetrate walls to disrupt daily life, he said.

 

State DOT doesn’t dispute that the A-scale misses lower-frequency sound.

 

…Maguire, the Indiana noise specialist, has found…A-weighting as an arbitrary system never meant to be applied in the way federal authorities now use it.

 

He suggests emulating other nations that have used modern science to develop more realistic ways of measuring the full range of noise impacts.

 

Numerous studies show that low-intensity noise is at least as disruptive and potentially harmful to health as higher tones, he said.

 

Taft Wireback, August 16, 2009

Greensboro News and Record

 

If the noise associated with the Southern half of Urban Loop was much more than advertized, I believe the last section of the Urban Loop through Greensboro’s 3rd District should be cancelled or rerouted North.

 

If Urban Loop noise walls will only be constructed in front of homes built before 1996…?

 

Urban Loop V: More traffic than previously anticipated.

 

City of Greensboro City Council Candidate Information Request VII:

On the Urban Loop

 

Why did who purchase so much of Greensboro’s Urban Loop real estate

so early?

 

Urban Loop IV

 

Urban Loop III

 

Urban Loop II

 

Urban Loop

"I do not recall a case I voted on

where I was intimately knowledgeable about the Urban Loop”

 

City Council member Zack Matheny

said of the two years he served on the city’s Zoning Commission

before his election to the council.

Greensboro News and Record, May 31, 2009

Urban Loop V: More traffic than previously anticipated.

A bigger interchange

 

DOT says it needs a chunk of the subdivision for the next phase of Greensboro’s Urban Loop…from the loop’s current end at Burlington Road in eastern Greensboro to U.S. 29.

 

An expanded interchange is necessary, DOT says, because of higher traffic projections than when roadway engineers filed their initial “corridor map” in October 1996.

 

Traffic estimates nixed a smaller interchange four years ago, after planners decided to remake U.S. 29 into a controlled-access expressway known as Interstate 785. The Urban Loop through that area will be a four-lane highway identified as Interstate 840.

 

Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record

City of GreensboroCity Council Candidate Information Request VII

All animals are equal

but some animals are more equal than others

 

Some of George Orwell’s Pigs

 

If the Fed Ex Hub is a 24 hour operation, how many tractor trailers are expected to pass through the northern section of the Urban Loop on the way to the airport or western North Carolina every night?

 

If a projected 72,200 cars and trucks use the eastern and northern Urban Loop per day, how much should traffic increase around the exits?

 

How much should traffic increase from the south?

Urban Loop III

…the new loop around eastern and northern Greensboro will be Interstate 840…a controlled-access freeway carrying an estimated 72,200 cars and trucks each day hurtling along at 65 mph or more.

 

Chris Boulware…lives in one of a dozen neighborhoods that local officials approved in recent years on land butting directly against the future Urban Loop or, as in the case of Carriage Woods, separated only by a wedge of woods or field.

 

Developments range from Briarmeade and Wynterhall east of U.S. 29 to the Bluffs at Richland Creek and Liberty Square on the city’s northwestern side.

 

All of the neighborhoods were approved after it became known that the loop had targeted a $300 million, concrete-and-asphalt bull’s-eye on these areas.

 

In the last decade, local government has authorized relatively close residential development similar to what exists across town in southwest Greensboro, where residents were outraged by highway noise and related issues after the latest section of the Urban Loop debuted there 16 months ago.

…judging from what happened last year in southwest Greensboro, people living too close to all that whizzing, new traffic will not be happy campers.

 

“I don’t want to be on the City Council when they cut it through Lake Jeanette,” veteran Councilman Robbie Perkins said of the uproar the loop’s construction likely will cause in that area of upper-income homeowners near the lake’s namesake road. “There’s going to be people out there who will be absolutely devastated.”

 

…The disruption that threatens the city’s northern tier stems from sources that include weak real estate laws in North Carolina, glib sales pitches, opportunistic developers, inexperienced buyers, and limited understanding of expressway design and construction among some local officials.

 

…the state DOT doesn’t make local development decisions, Gene Conti, the state’s new secretary of transportation said. So part of the answer is local officials working harder to defend city residents from new neighborhoods that make too little allowance for DOT’s 800 pound gorilla waiting in the wings.

 

Some Greensboro residents bought new homes along unbuilt sections of the loop thinking that when the road was built, it surely would come equipped with sound-deadening walls.

 

Unfortunately not, said Gregory Smith, a DOT specialist in highway noise.

 

When the state establishes a highway corridor, as it did for the Urban Loop in 1996, it accepts limited responsibility for noise protection for all existing development along that route.

 

Anything built after that falls on local government or the developer to protect from highway noise, Smith said.

 

Not long ago, Smith examined aerial photography of the route across northern Greensboro, showing all the newly developed areas that don’t have a chance of getting sound barriers on the DOT’s dime.

 

“I was amazed at how much construction had occurred since the original document was filed in 1996,” he said.

 

City zoning officials don’t always understand such nuances when they authorize projects beside or near the loop’s future route. They seldom discuss the new road’s effect on future residents.

 

“I do not recall a case I voted on where I was intimately knowledgeable about the Urban Loop,” City Council member Zack Matheny said of the two years he served on the city’s Zoning Commission before his election to the council.

 

 “You can tell people that a tsunami is a huge wall of water,” Perkins said. “But the reality is very different from just being told. When it’s actually coming at you, it’s a whole different animal.”

 

Scores of homes built in blacktop bull's-eye

Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record

If premeditated crime tends to occur in easily accessed and escapable areas, and the Urban Loop is slated to have conveniently located entrance and exit ways on Battleground Avenue, around Lake Brandt Road, on Lawndale Drive, Elm Street, Yanceyville Street and Route 29 etc…?

A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing

one that sounds good and a real one

 

J P Morgan

 

If causes, actions or winners have effects, reactions or losers, and A is caused, allowed, accelerated, held back or prevented, is it better to pre-think what could happen to B, C and D than not?

 

Everybody sooner or later

sits down to a banquet of consequences

 

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Can non-random events cause random effects?

Urban Loop IV

Disgruntled residents are hoping to make a statement about how serious a problem the loop is causing, said Steve Gladson, a resident of King's Mill neighborhood.

 

The loop goes through the middle of Gladson's neighborhood. It has a partial noise wall, but the wall is not tall enough to be effective, he said.

 

Government officials bear blame for allowing development too close to the eight-lane highway, Gladson said.

 

"They've allowed development where it should never have been," he said. "But no one in government wants to take responsibility for it."

 

Mills said the DOT will do whatever it can for people whose houses were built before 1996, when DOT publicly announced the loop's route.

 

"Anybody who built after that, we can't do anything for," he said. "We depend on the local government to advise people who are building new houses."

 

Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record

If Urban Loop noise walls will only be constructed in front of homes built before 1996…?

Angry neighbors complain about loop

 

…agreeing road noise is unpleasant, representatives from the state Department of Transportation told the crowd that, basically, they were out of luck.

 

Noise walls have been constructed beside only a few neighborhoods and all those homes were built before 1996, the date the road's current route was declared publicly, DOT officials said.

 

DOT policy prevents residents living in neighborhoods built after that time from being considered for sound barriers retroactively, they said.

"DOT does not have jurisdiction over what's built next to the highway," state noise analyst Greg Smith said. "That's a municipal issue. It was built with full knowledge that the highway was to be there."

 

In some cases, DOT found areas where noise levels were high enough to justify a wall, but there were too few houses there in 1996 to make a wall feasible.

 

DOT could plant landscaping to provide a visual screen, but even that would be centered in neighborhoods that were built before 1996 but which did not qualify for a noise wall.

 

Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record

 

Urban Loop Locator

Urban Loop II

Planners get earful on loop noise

 

Residents near the western Urban Loop gave transportation planners an earful about the new road's incessant noise…

 

Loop neighbor Ron Frazier said he was speaking for "over 300 neighbors" whose lives have been turned upside down by the noise and the lack of meaningful help from either state or local officials. "Some of them have to sleep with the TV on all night or with earplugs."

 

…DOT…is limited by federal highway regulations in what it can do about noise issues, said Mike Mills, DOT's division engineer for the Greensboro area.

 

Greensboro Councilwoman Sandra Anderson Groat asked if the issue should be DOT's alone: "Do we not at the City Council have a responsibility to these taxpaying citizens?"

 

Told the city had agreed to provide landscaping beyond what DOT can furnish along the route, she said that didn't sound like enough.

 

Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record

Why did who purchase so much of Greensboro’s Urban Loop real estate so early?

Nowhere else in North Carolina has DOT amassed such an agglomeration of real estate, says Bonnie Tripp Simmons, DOT administrative agent in Raleigh whose duties include managing all this property.

 

“Greensboro is a unique situation,” she says. “We have property in other places, not to that volume.”

 

DOT’s holdings stretch in bits and pieces across the entire 18-mile spectrum of the unfinished loop. It has spent from $3.7 million to $9.9 million on land for each of the four sections that are left.

 

Simmons says she has no clue why DOT accumulated so much along parts of a route that might not be completed until the 2020 or later.

 

…DOT’s preference is to buy land no sooner than a couple of years before it’s paved in asphalt and concrete.

 

“Acquiring land really is the last activity before construction,” said Doug Allison, manager of DOT’s right-of-way office in the state capital.

 

Taft Wireback

Greensboro News and Record, July 12, 2009

If the noise associated with the Southern half of Urban Loop was much more than advertized, I believe the last section of the Urban Loop through Greensboro’s 3rd District should be cancelled or rerouted North.

Residents Still Living with Urban Loop Noise

 

Neighbors living near the Greensboro Urban Loop say the recent rerouting of I-40 traffic has not helped with the noise.

 

The DOT originally routed all I-40 traffic onto the Urban Loop in Greensboro and changed the existing I-40 route to Business 40.

 

Neighbors acknowledge the decrease in traffic on the roadway but say the noise is still there.

 

"Once we go inside, we turn up the TV extra loud and block it out. I think the first time a truck went by I jumped up and ran out of the house because I thought it was an earthquake, said Antwan Washington, a Greensboro resident that lives near the loop.

 

Washington has lived in his home before the loop was opened and before sound barriers were built.

 

The next section of the Urban Loop that will run from US 70 to US 29 is scheduled to open in 2010.

 

WGHP, July 21, 2009