In their drive to complete the South Lawrence Trafficway, state transportation officials are pushing to have a route chosen by year’s end, even as opponents maintain that they don’t stand a chance.

The Kansas Department of Transportation is counting on the release of the project’s draft environmental impact statement by June 15, said Mike Rees, KDOT’s chief counsel. That would give officials enough time to establish a path for the road and start moving dirt before Dean Carlson leaves his post as transportation secretary Jan. 10.

“KDOT’s committed to getting it done,” Rees said Tuesday. “Secretary Carlson’s committed to getting it under way before he leaves. We really want to get some kind of work done this year.”

Last month’s searches for unmarked American Indian graves in the Baker Wetlands ? including one conducted using ground-penetrating radar ? failed to turn up any evidence of burials along the road’s possible 32nd Street alignment, Rees said.

That’s a good sign, he said, as it lifts a potential roadblock to meeting a timeline for connecting Kansas Highway 10 east of town with the unfinished trafficway’s bridge on U.S. Highway 59 on Lawrence’s southern edge.

“I don’t see anything stopping the process,” Rees said.

But Anna Wilson, spokeswoman for the Wetlands Preservation Organization and a prominent opponent of the trafficway, said that the search for graves alone signaled that state officials were insensitive to the concerns of American Indian tribes.

The radar search only followed one route, and then only in areas where there wasn’t standing water. Relatively few dry areas were available, she said, given that it rained during the search and the area remains, by definition, a wetlands.

“KDOT, in looking the way they’re looking, they just wanted to scratch the surface and say they’re done ? there’s a check mark and they’re done,” she said. “It’s not that way.”

The issue of graves aside, Wilson said she was confident Rees and his fellow KDOT officials wouldn’t come anywhere close to meeting their timeline. American Indian tribes are still offering their comments to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing compilation of the project’s required environmental impact statement.

And the tribes still have plenty of commenting to do ? well into the fall, she said.

“A year or two might be realistic, but this year?” Wilson said. “No way.”

Financial issues nearly derailed the entire project, Rees said. With indecision in the Kansas Legislature about future highway funding, preliminary design work for the trafficway’s interchange with K-10 was put on hold earlier this year.

Now that lawmakers approved taxes to support roads, Rees said, the financing is back on track. Finishing the trafficway is expected to cost up to $100 million, which includes $8.5 million for expanding the Baker Wetlands and other work south of the Haskell Indian Nations University campus.

The first nine miles of the trafficway, connecting Interstate 70 northwest of Lawrence to the southern end of Iowa Street, cost about $45 million and opened to traffic in 1996.