When Wilmington mayor Bill Saffo thinks about local transportation projects that have lost their place on the N.C. Department of Transportation priority list, the Independence Boulevard extension immediately comes to mind.

The project, which would extend Independence Boulevard to connect with Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway and widen it significantly, is badly needed, he said, to provide another major north-south corridor through Wilmington and relieve congestion on South College Road.

Under the state’s new project ranking system, called the Strategic Mobility Formula, that plan to upgrade Independence won’t happen, said Laura Padgett, a Wilmington City Council member who also chairs the Wilmington Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Transportation Advisory Committee.

Andrew Keller, owner of the Ivy Cottage, a multi-building consignment store fronting Market near the point at which Independence would cross, won’t be sorry if the roadway is never built. As designed  now, it would engulf Ivy Cottage’s Building 3 and a couple of warehouses behind it and would eat up  most of the parking lot to the north of Building 2.

“We would lose jobs,” he said. “I know it’s always been a dream of the city, but they are widening Kerr Avenue. Why not just make Independence two lanes to Martin Luther King?”

Independence Boulevard Extension is not alone in losing priority. Area officials are similarly disappointed that several other projects important to the Cape Fear area have not been given priority in the state’s Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP) or even in Gov. Pat McCrory’s recently proposed Connect NC $1.4 transportation bond list. Notable projects that have fallen from consideration, at least for now, are the Cape Fear River crossing and the Hampstead Bypass.

Local officials are concerned that not investing in new roads or addressing congestion will stymie business growth in the area.

Padgett is hopeful, since environmental assessment of the Cape Fear river crossing options is underway, that the project will ultimately rise in priority.

“It should receive statewide project funding because it affects the port, the Department of Defense [mobilizations], and [inland distribution] centers,” she said.

David Williams, chairman of the Pender County Board of Commissioners, also is adamant about the need for the Hampstead Bypass.

“There will be a point, if we don’t get the Hampstead Bypass, that somebody in power will say we can’t grow anymore,” he said. “For the health of the county and the safety
of people who travel along Highway 17, the bypass is a must.”

The TIP does include the Military Cutoff Extension, providing a corridor stretching from Market Street to the John Jay Burney Jr. Freeway (U.S. 17 North). It also includes the completion of the Interstate 140 bypass connecting Interstate 40 with U.S. 17 South in Brunswick County.

Padgett explained the reason that Independence Boulevard Extension slipped from favor.

“It ... was hugely expensive in the way it was designed,” she said.

On the DOT drawing board for Independence is a 350-foot-wide, multi-lane roadway elevated 25 feet above grade on a berm, with overpasses at railroad tracks and cross streets and designed to allow 55 mile-per-hour traffic, according to Padgett.

“Independence should be seen as a city road and designed that way. In the opinion of most city council members it should not have been designed as super expressway, but as a smaller road – and that may happen,” she said.

If Wilmington can get the state to move the railroad tracks to the other side of the Cape Fear River, that would remove the biggest obstacle to creating a wider, longer Independence Boulevard at grade, she said.

“The extension was one of the top five projects in the region for decades,” Padgett said. “It is needed and will be needed more as development continues.”

The Strategic Mobility Formula, established as part of North Carolina’s 2013 Strategic Transportation Investments law (STI), was designed to remove politics from the process of prioritizing projects throughout the state, officials say.

It takes a tiered approach, setting aside percentages of the overall state transportation budget for projects that have local (division), regional and statewide impact, according to DOT officials.

At each level, qualitative as well as quantitative information is considered in ranking projects, said NCDOT spokeswoman Nicole Meister.

Williams said officials in his county are solidly behind the need for the Hampstead Bypass, which has disappeared from DOT’s priority list, partly because – despite supporting it pre-formula – the MPO eliminated the project from its priority list.

“With the way the new funding formula is, it clearly makes it worse on local projects,” Williams said. “The Hampstead Bypass was doomed from the start. If the Wilmington MPO had ranked it, there would have been no money for any other project for decades. I’m not upset with the MPO.

“At $200 million-plus, the Hampstead Bypass is in a no man’s land. It does not rank high enough locally or at the state level. Some folks in Raleigh’s first reaction was ‘The MPO didn’t rank it high,’ but they don’t understand.”

The county’s strategy, at this point, is to get the bypass project included in the Connect NC proposal, which now contains no substantial road projects for southeastern North Carolina. Williams said Pender County is spending about $35,000 for a lobbyist to advocate for the project in the General Assembly.

McCrory’s administration is also lobbying the legislature to put Connect NC on the November ballot. It is betting that voters would pass the measure, which would spend roughly $1.4 for capital projects and repairs at historic sites, parks and educational institutions as well as $1.4 for transportation projects.

Williams would like the bypass to get a piece of that transportation money.

“About 70 percent of our tax base is along the Highway 17 corridor,” Williams said. “The east side [of the county] has to be vibrant and safe.”

Explaining how road projects made it into the Connect NC proposal, Meister said that planners chose unfunded projects that were next on the TIP priority list and for which environmental impact statements had been completed, making the projects essentially shovel ready.

Padgett said localities like Wilmington have lost much of the authority they had in pre-formula days to advocate for locally or regionally important projects.

“This [formula] is not a bad idea,” she said. “The idea was to put money where the most congestion is based on data. But where do you find the most congestion? In the Triangle, the Triad and in Charlotte. Never mind that there are pockets of congestion in other parts of the state, but they do not affect as many people. [The STI] drove money away from less populated parts of the state and ended programs that would have protected them.”

The STI grouped all kinds of transportation into Wilmington’s Division 3 domain: Wilmington International Airport, the Port of Wilmington, public transit, roads and ferries, Padgett said. With responsibilities for many transportation modes, the MPO then lost much of its clout for ranking projects, she said.

“We [the MPO] have no say on the statewide money. And most of the division and regional projects submitted through the division engineer were not on the MPO’s long-range transportation plan list,” Padgett said.

“We don’t have enough points in the division or region tiers to accomplish any major projects that would make a difference,” she continued. “We already gave up part of the Kerr Road widening: the portion from Randall to Wilshire.”

Meister contends that local MPOs and regional division pairs have plenty of say in ranking projects for their areas, since at the division level, 50 percent of the weight is given to what she terms the “qualitative” assessments of need and viability. In each case, the MPO has equal weight with the NCDOT division engineer in determining that assessment.

“We know [the formula] is not perfect,” she said. “It’s an ongoing process to look at it. Scoring is updated every two years, and there can be tweaks, like considering seasonal traffic forecasts – we know that’s an issue in the coastal areas as well as in the mountains.”

The overarching problem, Meister added, is that transportation needs are great and funding is limited, even if Connect NC is approved.

“We had 3,100 projects submitted in the last call for projects [in 2013],” she said. “They go through a scoring process. We can fund only one in five.”