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Updated: April 2004
The New River Parkway is a big government plan to build a highway from the I-64 Interchange at Sandstone, West Virginia to Hinton, Pipestem, and eventually Princeton, West Virginia. The original concept was to provide a scenic highway through this rural part of West Virginia to promote economic development while at the same time preserving the beauty and the way of life for the people in the New River Valley. The proposed road though (see map below) bypasses Hinton, the town which it is most supposed to benefit.
In fact, the Revised Goals of the New River Parkway as put out by the Parkway Authority in 1990 specifically stated the goal was to "improve public access to the New River and other features while respecting private property rights."
It appears now this was just a government ruse to quell opposition to the hidden more ambitious plan to eliminate private property ownership and hand over control of the land to federal and other government entities. The revised plan, without an environmental impact study, was announced late in 1999 to the horror of many residents.
The revised plan more than doubled the amount of property being taken by the government. It planned to take land and home sites from the elderly, retirees, and long-time residents. Many of these people are too poor to resist the plan, which carves up the valley and remakes it into something it never was.
In Right of Way, a West Virginia Department of Transportation Publication, the agency asserts that our state constitution, West Virginia's governing principles, provides a "guarantee that necessary public improvements can be built and so located that they will render maximum benefit and also that affected public property owners will be fully compensated." Yet this project as it was revised in 1999 failed all of those tests:
a) there is no public necessity for the scope of the project (taking more land than is necessary to build the road).
b) the plan does not compensate property owners for the full value of their land, which includes scenic and physical value.
c) the project does not render maximum benefit for ALL people concerned.
The Good News is that New River Friends along with a grass roots coalition of people refused to take the governments 1999 plan without a fight. As a result the government was forced to revise its plan. The latest plan, announced in March 2004 now takes only the land necessary to build the road. Though we continue to have some grave concerns about the implementation of the plan and how that will be used to drive people out of the valley/limit their livelihoods, this is a step in the right direction. We must be cautious though as to ensure this is not a trojan victory.
