The long and tortured history of the South Lawrence Trafficway might have been much shorter had Leslie Blevins Sr. not intervened.

Blevins, who died Friday at age 85, filed the first-ever SLT-related lawsuit in 1987. He joined two other plaintiffs in a second suit in 1990. Both cases were eventually rejected by the Kansas Supreme Court, but the delay they caused was crucial.

The trafficway remains uncompleted 15 years later.

“Practically, it stalled the SLT at least four, five years,” said Donald Strole, the Lawrence attorney who represented Blevins in those cases. “It gave some other (opposing) groups time to get organized.”

But Blevins wasn’t necessarily against the road  in fact, he once offered an alternative plan.

“What you’re talking about building here is something that’s going to be with us for the next 100 years,” he told the Journal-World in 1990. “We sure as heck ought to be doing everything possible we can to do it right today.”

Instead, Blevins’ problem was with financing. Douglas County commissioners authorized a $4 million bond issue in 1985 to build the road.

“When he heard about what the county had done, he thought that wasn’t right,” said Blevins’ son, Les Jr. “He thought they shouldn’t have done that without voter approval.”

The Kansas Supreme Court eventually agreed, although it gave Douglas County a waiver in the case. But city and county officials went ahead with a 1990 referendum in which voters approved issuing bonds for the road. Blevins then joined a lawsuit against the results of that election; that case wasn’t resolved until 1992.

“He was a fighter,” Strole said. “It brought into awareness how the county was trying to push the thing through without much public voice.

“Now there’s a lot of public voice.”