It was a project more than 10 years in the making, but today, the Raleigh City Council voted unanimously to scrap planned improvements to the Six Forks Road corridor.
Two successful municipal transportation bonds—one on voters’ ballots in 2013 and one in 2017—were supposed to have paid for the improvements that, in 2020, were given a price tag of $31.3 million.
But by 2024, the project’s budget had ballooned to $119 million, and after spending the last year attempting to re-scope the project, the council ultimately decided at its meeting Tuesday afternoon that it is unfeasible. The city already spent more than $9 million on the project, according to city staff.
“This was a corridor project of extreme interest but we could now see the escalation in cost, which makes it just impractical, or impossible, to do,” said first-term council member Mitchell Silver from District A, where the project was planned.
In 2012, the City of Raleigh kicked off a study around how to best improve the corridor, which runs through Raleigh’s bustling Midtown and North Hills district, and sees some 50,000 car trips each day.
The corridor study took six years to complete, and was adopted in 2018 following design recommendations and community engagement.
The design and community engagement phases—based on the $31.3 million budget—didn’t start until spring 2020 and lasted into 2021. The final designs proposed establishing a six-lane, median-divided street section between Rowan Street to the south, traveling north up to Lynn Road, with separated bicycle and pedestrian lanes on each side and protected intersection designs to improve crossing safety, as well as street lighting, landscaping, stormwater enhancements, and improved transit stops.
But “market escalation for both construction and real estate has had a significant impact on the estimated costs of this project,” city officials wrote in Tuesday’s meeting agenda. Staff tried to salvage the project, with $14.6 million reallocated to the project in 2023 under the city’s Capital Improvement Program. The city also secured an additional $14 million in federal funds
In March, city staff told the council that the re-scoped project had grown to a cost of $93.5 million, an increase of $37.4 million, or 67 percent, over the new planned budget, and city officials started assessing “all options” for the corridor due to the “staggering change,” according to the agenda materials.
Now, the funds that were originally allocated for the project will be redirected to make spot improvements for safety and infrastructure along the corridor, including closing a 500-foot sidewalk gap in front of Carroll Middle School and adding a multimodal bridge connecting communities in the Midtown area to the city’s greenway system.
“I know this is incredibly frustrating for everyone,” said Raleigh mayor Janet Cowell. “And I guess I would also want to highlight, we’ve talked a lot about process, and it is extremely frustrating to hear it took six years for a corridor study, years of design. Just, you know, what are the ways we can do these things more efficiently?”
At-large council member Jonathan Lambert-Melton proposed using the bulk of the funds that would have gone to the corridor improvements for other smaller improvements in District A.
“I won’t, you know, beat a dead horse. This is disappointing to have this in front of us again, but dealing in the reality of the situation, I would like for us to do the sidewalk [extension] in front of Carroll Middle School,” he said. He added that he’d like to see signalized pedestrian crossings at Northbrook and Northwood Drives, a new signal at North Glen Drive, intersection improvements at Millbrook Road, and the multimodal bridge.
“I think that at least addresses the safety and connectivity concerns in the corridor,” he said. “On the other possible funding considerations, I think if we can keep some of this money in the area, then that makes a lot of sense, since it’s supposed to be going here.”
The rest of the money will go to completing improvements to Lake Wheeler Road from South Saunders Street to Maywood Avenue and widening Barwell Road from Rock Quarry Road to Berkeley Lake Road.
While city officials say the “market environment” especially post-pandemic is to blame for the ballooning cost of the project, some residents say the council killing the project raises accountability issues with the stewardship of money that was approved for the project in two separate municipal bond referenda.
Tim Canning lives a block off of Six Forks Road and has long been a supporter of the project. He says he’s not surprised that the council scrapped it, but he’s “really ticked off that [city council and staff] don’t take the time to explain to the voters who voted in good faith for this.”
Voters approved $1.8 million to initiate design for the project in Raleigh’s 2013 transportation bond, and an additional $29.5 million was approved in the city’s 2017 transportation bond to bring the project to completion.
“Not only have they taken this money and done whatever they wanted with it, but they ignore the will of the people, the vote,” Canning says. “That was, overwhelmingly, ‘We want this project done,’ and they’ve never explained that—the city or council has never explained to the [residents] what is really going on.”
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