The Army Corps of Engineers has refused to issue a permit for one of the segments of the Meadowcreek Parkway, NBC-29 reports, saying that they’re not about to allow the construction of a road to nowhere. Officially, the Meadowcreek Parkway is three projects—a road in Albemarle, a road in Charlottesville, and an interchange at 250. Critics charge that local officials are only taking that approach to skirt state and federal rules, and there is good reason to think that the road would be infeasible to construct if treated as a single entity. The Army Corps of Engineers is looking at the proposal for the Charlottesville portion of the road and balking at a road that simply stops in the middle of a park. This leaves the city and the county between a rock and hard place—they can’t build it as one road, and they also can’t build it in segments. Albemarle County is probably feeling pretty dumb right now—they’re 12% finished with building their segment, having deliberately jumped the gun in anticipating that no obstacles would arise. If this latest obstacle proves insurmountable, the county will prove to have wasted an enormous sum of money.
Where things go from here is anybody’s guess.
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