All Mike Rees wanted for Christmas was a final decision on a route for completing the South Lawrence Trafficway.

Now he’s left hoping for a preliminary resolution by the new year.

“It’s taking longer than I’d hoped for, but it’s getting done,” said Rees, who has kept his foot on the project’s accelerator as chief counsel for the Kansas Department of Transportation. “A month isn’t all that great amount of time. This has been going on for 10 years. Another month isn’t going to affect it.”

Rees and other supporters of completing the trafficway along a 32nd Street alignment still remain hopeful that federal regulators will choose a route for the road by year’s end, possibly by Friday. The public then would have 30 days to comment before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could issue its final ruling, called a record of decision.

Corps officials are weighing two preferred alignments for the four-lane highway that would connect the existing trafficway at U.S. Highway 59 with Kansas Highway 10 near Noria Road:

l The 32nd Street route, cutting through the Baker Wetlands, at an estimated cost of $105 million.

l A 42nd Street alignment, running south of the Wakarusa River, for an estimated $128.5 million.

Robert Smith, the corps’ trafficway project manager, said he intended to have his work finished today on the project’s final environmental impact statement, the voluminous document outlining regulators’ choice of alignments and reasons behind it. The document then would be revised before being sent out for printing.

Previous corps decisions have hinted at choosing the 32nd Street route.

But opponents of running the highway through the wetlands say the state’s wait for federal clearance could put the brakes on the project, no matter which route is chosen.

That’s because the state’s incumbent secretary of transportation, Dean Carlson, is expected to leave office Jan. 13, when Kathleen Sebelius is inaugurated as governor. Carlson has been a staunch backer of the trafficway project, dispatching Rees to focus on it for the past two years.

Also, with the state struggling to climb out of a deepening budget hole, the department could be forced to shelve any plans to buy land or plan for the highway, much less build it.

“The longer it goes, it obviously doesn’t make the outcome more certain,” said Charles Jones, who has opposed the 32nd Street alignment as a Douglas County commissioner.

And then there’s the longtime opposition from the Wetlands Preservation Organization, a group that has battled the trafficway in public and in the courtroom. Many of its members are students at nearby Haskell Indian Nations University, and they are on winter break.

Opposition

“The timing’s bad,” said Anna Wilson, a spokeswoman for the group. “All the students are gone. Thirty days isn’t enough, and we’ll have to ask for an extension. There’s no way the students can read an EIS in a week and be expected to respond.”

Project delays are nothing new. Douglas County residents voted in 1990 to approve borrowing $4 million to help finance the trafficway project, then envisioned to connect the Kansas Turnpike west of town with K-10 east of town. Construction on the western leg began in 1994 and opened to traffic two years later, but plans east of U.S. 59 remain embroiled in controversy.

Bob Johnson, a county commissioner who has led the charge for the 32nd Street route, said he remained confident in the project and its eventual completion.

“I would have been a whole lot more confident if this had happened 30 days ago,” Johnson said. “It’s unfortunate … but I can only assume that the reason for the delay is because they are trying harder to be absolutely sure they are doing the right thing the right way.”