Raymond Proffitt Foundation
Pollution Update: Feb 28 1997
Joe Turner, editor
Bud Shuster Rollercoaster: Part I
This week members of the Sierra Club Moshannon Group and Bald Eagle Ridge Protection Alliance (BERPA) in Centre County learned more about the US Route 220 project and how EPA is desperately attempting to concoct a way to "mitigate" for a bad decision. How bad? How about the unnecessary loss of almost 3,000 acres of interior forest? Fifteen acres of irreplaceable, high quality spring-fed wetlands. And many tens of thousands of linear feet of ridgeside stream habitat on Bald Eagle Ridge that provide hydrology to valley wetlands on State Game Lands 278 that contain state endangered plants.
Throughout the environmental review process of this highway improvement project in northeastern Blair and southwestern Centre Counties, DEP and EPA have been the only two natural resource agency to support placing the proposed 4-lane interstate highway to climb up to 1550 feet of elevation, ride along the western slope of the mountain for eight miles at average elevations over 1550 feet, to descend the mountain and cross the existing highway and valley. The highway then heads northwest up the Allegheny Front to bypass Port Matilda borough, then goes back down across the existing highway and the valley, and up the western slope of the ridge again on a new alignment, and finally traverses the ridge to go into the Nittany Valley. Hence, EPA supports Bud Shuster’s Rollercoaster. The more logical alternative is to improve the existing US Route 220 which is down in the Bald Eagle Valley. It already takes traffic from Bald Eagle to Port Matilda without going up and down a relatively untrammeled mountain.
The US Army Corps of Engineers has to issue a permit before the highway project can proceed. The Corps has decided to NOT choose the least environmentally damaging alternative as required by EPA’s Clean Water Act Section 404(b)(1) guidelines!. Instead, the Corps (the Nation’s trustee of US waters and wetlands) has decided that either the ridge route or a valley route is permissible as long as PennDOT comes up with enough mitigation.
When you have a financial backer like Bud Shuster, the money for mitigation is no problem. The whole 17 mile highway in Shuster’s rural district will cost half a BILLION dollars. Never mind that under objective standards, an interstate highway is not warranted between the bustling cities of Bald Eagle and Port Matilda. When Bud wants a highway, he calls it a "demonstration project" so that it doesn’t have to meet any objective criteria. Sounds like these projects should cause demonstrations among the drivers who see needed road repairs and money for mass transit sunk into another "Bud Shuster Highway."
BERPA consists of ridge landowners and twenty conservation groups, among them Trout Unlimited—Spring Creek Chapter, Sierra Club, Audubon Council of PA, Centre County Federation of Sportsmens Clubs, and the National Wildlife Federation. BERPA supports the PA Fish and Boat Commission, the PA Game Commission, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service in their position that upgrading the existing road with modifications is the least damaging environmental alternative. PennDOT should modify the valley alignment to minimize residential displacements, and impacts to farm fields, wetlands and other wildlife habitat. They have not given comparable effort to the valley alignment, thus allowing them to dismiss it more easily.
According to EPA’s comments on the Final Environmental Impact Statement, EPA is now searching for a cosmetic repair of the ill-concieved decision to not choose the least environmentally damaging alternative for Route 220. EPA has asked PennDOT’s consultants (Skelly & Loy, Inc.) to approach a few of the conservation groups (Audubon Society and the land conservancies) to quietly offer them $200,000, according to BERPA sources affiliated with the other groups. That’s a lot of money! What is it for? To preserve a forest known to be important bird areas somewhere else, to try to somehow make up for the 3,000 acre loss of interior forest habitat. The forest on Bald Eagle Ridge has 13 breeding species of "area-sensitive" neotropical migrants in the path of the EPA approved highway 220! These birds would arrive here in May from Central America to see another concrete monument to Bud Shuster’s vanity.
The Moshannon Group of the Sierra Club and BERPA encourages these groups to reject any offer of money for Important Bird Areas. The US Fish and Wildlife Service plans to challenge the US Army Corps of Engineers permit which authorizes PennDOT and the Federal Highway Administration to build the ridge top rollercoaster nobody wants. Oh, except , Bud Shuster, a few folks in the valley, State Senator J. Doyle Corman, State Rep Lynn Herman, the highway contractors, and the "B&L Holding Company," a mysterious landowner on the ridge controlling 1200 acres of surface and mineral rights within the proposed RT-G right-of way. Nobody knows who they are, and BERPA has tried to find out who they are with no success. Who could have known, in 1988, when B&L bought the property, that someday a highway may go right over top of it? Maybe the folks that comprise B&L?
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