One Acadiana makes I-49 South a priority

Hurricane evacuation. Economic growth, especially along the U.S. 90 “Energy Corridor.” Fewer car crashes on a stretch of highway once known as Blood Alley.
For anyone who lives along U.S. 90 from Lafayette to New Orleans – and that’s about a third of Louisiana’s population – the justifications for turning that stretch of four-lane into Interstate 49 South are as familiar as weekday afternoon traffic back-ups in Broussard. Supporters just haven’t been able to make the whole upgrade happen yet, for reasons that include a $3 billion price tag.
Now, One Acadiana, the regional economic development initiative embracing nine Acadiana parishes, has made the 25-year quest to create I-49 South one of its four priorities. One Acadiana and local and state government officials talked about that fourth priority at a news conference Thursday at the Billeaud Companies.
“We know achieving success will require leadership and commitment for Louisiana’s next governor and the nine-parish legislative delegation,” said Lafayette banker Joseph B. Zanco, One Acadiana’s chairman. “We want to push over the goal line a project that has been in the works for more than 25 years.
“Let’s finish what we started. Let’s complete I-49 South.”
U.S. 90 between Interstate 10, which is where the existing section of I-49 ends, and New Orleans’ West Bank has been designated a future interstate corridor for more than a decade. The Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce in particular was a key mover in efforts to upgrade U.S. 90 to interstate status.
Parts of the current highway are carrying half again as many vehicles per day as they were designed to handle, said Kam Movassaghi, former University of Louisiana at Lafayette professor and former state transportation secretary. He talked about hurricanes such as Andrew in 1992, before local planners learned about contraflow and coordinating traffic signals. In Lafayette, the Evangeline Thruway became a parking lot.
Louisiana traffic fatalities are up 20 percent this year over the same time in 2014, Movassaghi said. The state’s drivers pay the third-highest auto insurance premiums in the nation. And between 2012 and 2014, 25 fatal crashes have happened on U.S. 90 between Lafayette and New Orleans.
Some progress has been made. Controlling access is vital to interstate design, and overpasses have replaced some of the crossovers and traffic lights that slow traffic and contribute to accidents. Just outside the Billeaud Companies offices on St. Nezaire Road, U.S. 90 is being widened and improved.
In all, said One Acadiana President and CEO Jason El Koubi, 100 miles of the targeted 160 miles of U.S. 90 already are of interstate quality, or close to it.
Obstacles remain. One is the fact that some crossovers and traffic signals remain on U.S. 90, including those in Broussard and Patterson. Another is the scale of the I-49 Connector, the portion of U.S. 90 between I-10 and Lafayette Regional Airport. The connector is expected to cost at least $750 million, accounting for a quarter of I-49 South’s remaining $3 billion estimated cost.
Still another snag: Plans to run I-49 South through Lafayette along the urbanized Evangeline Thruway corridor have provoked opposition at least as far back as 1994. The concern there has centered on the idea that north Lafayette would be divided by the highway and on the impact on existing neighborhoods, including the historic Sterling Grove district.
El Koubi said Thursday that the connector is about to enter the design phase.
“The long, arduous planning process is over,” El Koubi said.
That doesn’t mean transportation officials have identified $750 million in available cash. But Movassaghi said officials have found the money for the connector design work. After that, he said, officials will have to find money for the next phase, and so on until the work is complete.
“That’s how you eat an elephant,” Movassaghi said. “One bite at a time.”
One way to complete the work is to build a coalition of state, local and federal officials who will push to keep I-49 South moving ahead, said Movassaghi and Bill Fontenot, the St. Landry Parish president and a former Department of Transportation and Development district engineer based in Lafayette.
One example, Fontenot said, would be enshrine I-49 South in the massive federal surface transportation legislation. Congress has reauthorized the act for a year at a time recently but hasn’t retooled it for the entire five-year period it’s supposed to cover.
“They’ve extended it, I don’t know, a dozen or more times,” Fontenot said, “and not really given the states, the states I’m talking about, a five- or six-year plan, which is what you need to have a good planning process. With that, I think the pressure will come for more dollars from the federal government. So I think it’s more realistic for funding on that kind of project than something new.
“I think a crucial piece that we’re missing is that $12 billion backlog.”
The backlog is the cost to complete the work now identified by state government as needing to be done. One Acadiana wants to help find a way to reduce that backlog and to advocate for other projects, such as improved arterials throughout the region, the Lafayette Regional Xpressway and a new regional beltway.
But the priority, the officials agreed, is I-49 South.
“Across our region,” said Buddy Schilling of Schilling Distributing in Lafayette, “people are starting to catch on to what businesses have known for a while. We’re not bound by parish lines, we’re a small state and we should be able to travel to any part of the state very efficiently.
“The completion of I-49 from Lafayette to New Orleans is a big part of this.”