40 years ago: Dispute arises over frontage roads for planned Clinton Parkway

From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Oct. 22, 1973:

  • Another issue had arisen with the plans for the construction of Clinton Parkway. It had been learned the previous week that Finney and Turnipseed, Topeka consultants on the road project, had not planned for frontage roads along the parkway, but the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Department had. John Frazier, project supervisor for the consultants, said today he doubted the Environmental Protection Agency would approve parkway funding if the frontage road were included because they would obstruct noise barriers and add to the noise problems about which the EPA had already raised concerns. However, Richard McClanathan, the city-county planning director, said that frontage roads could not be excluded from the plans without defeating the purpose of the road, adding that a 22nd Street north of the Parkway, proposed by engineers to provide access to the road for development along it, would be impossible to build because the Alvamar Golf Course would be extended too far south. The misunderstanding with the consultants, he said, had arisen in part because Finney and Turnipseed had never consulted the planning department about proposed development in the area. “There is mostly a communications problem here,” McClanathan said, “and we all need to sit down and decide what we are doing.”
  • In the nation’s capital today, the House of Representatives began preliminary inquiries into whether or not President Nixon should be impeached. The first of several resolutions calling for impeachment was introduced this morning in the wake of Nixon’s firing of special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. House Speaker Carl Albert, who in the temporary absence of a U.S. Vice President was next in line to succeed Nixon if the president were removed from office, called for quick action on the nomination of Rep. Gerald R. Ford to fill the vacant VP office, from which Spiro Agnew had resigned nearly two weeks earlier.