Oswald P. Backus IV wants to make the Kansas Department of Transportation eat its words, and he went to court to raid the department’s cupboard for the food.

Backus, a member of the Franklin-Douglas County Coalition of Concerned Citizens, recently won a court judgment giving him access to the department’s transcript of a public meeting regarding the future of U.S. Highway 59.

The department, which is mulling two alternatives for rebuilding the highway between Lawrence and Ottawa, argued that it didn’t need to serve up the document because a final decision about the highway had not been reached.

Such deliberative documents are not subject to disclosure under the Kansas Open Records Act, said Marty Matthews, a department spokesman.

But in a ruling on Backus’ suit filed in Shawnee County District Court, Judge Franklin Theis told the department to hand over transcripts from the April 30 public meeting. The meeting drew dozens of people to Baldwin High School to learn about the project and question department officials and their representatives about the plans.

Backus said that while he was pleased with the judge’s ruling, he didn’t like the tone of the dispute nor what it insinuated.

“We’re very worried about whether KDOT is really following the law, so we’re keeping a close watch over them,” said Backus, a software engineer who lives south of Lawrence, about 1.5 miles from U.S. 59. “The fact that they didn’t want to give this to us is an indication of that.

“It’s more of their bad faith. They aren’t working with the public. They’re working against the public. This is more evidence of that.”

¢ 6News video: Courts order KDOT to release transcripts of closed meeting

Deadly stretch

The department is considering two alternatives for rebuilding the 18-mile stretch of highway, a path considered among the deadliest of its kind in the state.

State officials say that the road’s accident rate is 25 percent higher than those on similar highways elsewhere in Kansas. Building a freeway should cut the rate of fatal accidents by 80 percent, the department says, and trim the injury-accident rate by 60 percent.

In relation to the current road, the new highway would run either:

• 300 feet to the east, displacing 33 residences and eight businesses. The freeway would cost about $210.3 million when built in 2007, and require acquisition of about 960 acres of new right-of-way and affect 882.8 acres of prime farmland.
• A mile to the east, displacing 11 residences and two businesses. It would cost about $199.4 million in 2007, and require acquisition of about 970 acres of new right-of-way and affect 869 acres of prime farmland.

The department will include its decision in a final environmental impact statement, expected to be issued sometime next month.

Not a deposition

Matthews said that transportation officials had fought to keep the document secret not because they had anything to hide, but because coalition members changed the rules of the game.

The department had a court reporter at the April meeting to take down comments from people who chose not to write out letters of their own, Matthews said, not to document the give-and-take between a coalition attorney and a variety of department officials.

“These folks used it as if it was a deposition, and it was not,” Matthews said. “To sit down and have people essentially cross-examined … ‘misuse’ would be too strong of a word, but certainly that was not the purpose of having somebody there.

“It turned into a deposition. It was not the time and place for a deposition.”

Such a time and place could come soon. Coalition leaders say they would consider taking more legal action to stop the highway from being directed a mile east of the existing route.

Such a shift, they say, would harm the farm economy by cutting through fertile fields, native prairie, woodlands and other significant sites.