Syracuse officials look toward ‘next step’ for I-81 project
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The city of Syracuse will hold sessions later this month to reveal the city’s “vision” for the I-81 project, according to the city’s Chief Operating Officer Corey Driscoll Dunham.
Dunham said the city of Syracuse has been “in communication” with the New York State Department of Transportation. Although the state has plans for the $2.25 billion project, the city’s vision will be more specific and align community desires for places affected by the project like Almond Street, she said.
Following a New York state appeals court’s dismissal of Renew 81 For All’s legal challenge to the project on Feb. 2, the DOT can move forward with demolishing the viaduct. The state’s Supreme Court’s Appellate Division for the Fourth Department ruled unanimously that the DOT will no longer have to conduct additional environmental studies before the viaduct’s scheduled removal.
“These conversations have been happening well over a decade,” said Maurice “Mo” Brown, an Onondaga County legislator for the 15th district, which includes parts of downtown Syracuse, the South Side and Southwest neighborhoods. “We have to figure out what the next step is.”
In 2013, the DOT, Syracuse’s Metropolitan Transportation Council and Federal Highway Administration released the I-81 Corridor Study, a five-year-long study that concluded there would be a “near-term reconstruction or replacement” of I-81, according to a record of decision document. In 2019, the DOT announced its recommendation of the “community grid” option to replace the I-81 viaduct.
Following a COVID-19 delay, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the project would “break ground” in 2022. In Sep. 2022, Renew 81’s now-dismissed lawsuit was filed, and a month later, a judge halted the construction for over a year.
“We are disappointed by the Court’s decision. We may seek leave for the Court of Appeals (to) hear the case,” wrote Alan Knauf, an environmental law attorney who represented Renew 81 in court, in a statement to The Daily Orange.
Brown called the halt to the project “frustrating.” He said the conversation around the court-ordered halt prevented other conversations about the city’s plans for the land beneath I-81. Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh previously called the delay “unnecessary” in a statement to The D.O.
Several Syracuse city officials, including newly-elected auditor Alexander Marion, expressed support for the continuation of the viaduct removal project following the dismissal of Renew 81’s legal challenge.
“Syracuse has spent a decade planning how to reunite our community. We all know the community grid is the right answer for Syracuse,” Marion wrote in a press release. “I am pleased with today’s ruling that will allow us to move this project forward.”
The 1944 Federal Highway Act originally funded highway I-81, with construction to different parts of the highway concluding at the end of the 1960s, according to the record of decision. The highway’s construction destroyed the 15th Ward, which housed 90% of Syracuse’s Black population in 1950, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, which referred to the construction of I-81 as “racism by design.”
The community grid project is the “best way to right the wrongs” of the highway’s original construction, Brown said. He said the development of the area will fiscally benefit Syracuse because the city only collects taxes from around half of its tax base, due to tax-exempt hospitals and schools like Syracuse University.
Brown said his duties as an Onondaga County legislator include supporting the state and city’s plans to demolish I-81 while fulfilling his “obligation” to his constituents. As the construction begins, he anticipates resident relocations and commute time to increase.
“It’s on us at the county level to make that as easy as possible … making sure that the state DOT and those planners have everyone’s best interest when they reroute things,” Brown said. “We have to be the voice for the people, for the businesses, for the community.”
Although Gov. Kathy Hochul has the final say on decisions around the I-81 project, Brown said the state government has made a “concerted effort” to listen to local opinions and communicate with people in the city, through events like open houses.
Dunham said the city is “working collaboratively” to achieve both the DOT’s and the city’s goals of making the city more walkable and more accessible as part of its Vision Zero campaign. She cited that 25% of Syracuse residents don’t own a private vehicle.
“We’ve been a very car-focused community, a very car-focused society at large,” Brown said. “When you start thinking about modern cities, modern cities aren’t as car-focused. We’ve got to figure out better ways to move people around.”
Dunham emphasized the difficulty of updating the community on the plans and updates to I-81’s process. She said the city is making efforts to make the government “accessible” and share updates to the project in as many ways as possible.
Brown emphasized that highways across New York — and the U.S. as a whole — “bulldozed” through Black communities without any “consideration.” He said the community grid project is a way to acknowledge those “wrongs” and “move forward as a country.”
“(Syracuse) is not an outlier. We’re an outlier in that we took longer than a lot of places in the world. A lot of people, even around the country, figured out quickly: these highways, that went through poor communities, this was a pattern. We were not the only place where it happened,” Brown said.
