In rural New York State, many leaders see new highways as the salvation of their struggling economies.  In the Southern Tier, U.S.  Route 17 is well on its way to becoming limited access Interstate 86; much less further along but still on the table is the North Country Highway (or “Rooftop” Highway), a four-lane, limited access highway that would run 172 miles between Watertown and Plattsburgh, but five to seven miles away from existing U.S. Route 11. Proponents envision the new highway as Interstate 98.

The proposed North Country highway violates “Fix it First,” a key element of “smart growth” and a driving principle that guides our work at Empire State Future. With infrastructure dollars dwindling and simultaneously more thinly spread, we must put those dollars towards our existing roads and bridges, many of which are in critical need of repair. To embark on massive new road projects is to spread these resources even more dangerously thin, and pass higher costs to taxpayers without any guarantee that the roads will attract jobs and tax revenue.

But hundreds of millions have already been spent towards works such as the I-86/I-99 (U.S. 15/17) interchange that dwarfs Steuben County’s Village of Painted Post in a Dr. Seuss-like maze of over and underpasses.  The late David Forkenbrock, a University of Iowa professor who published several studies on the relationship between highway development and economic development, wrote that “policies that emphasize proper maintenance and relatively minor improvements [to existing roads] are likely to be more cost-effective strategies for economic development than expensive highway projects.” An annotated bibliography on highways and rural economic development done by the Economic Research Service of the USDA reports that new highway development can produce more costs than benefits to rural communities if those communities are bypassed (http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/bla133/bla133.pdf). What’s more, the kinds of businesses that do spring up along interstate interchanges—franchise restaurants, hotels, gas stations—will likely draw economic activity away from the bypassed communities, rather than to them. Communities such as Port Henry, once a thriving Route 9 community on the western shore of Lake Champlain has struggled mightily since Interstate 87 was built fifteen miles to the east.

The North Country Highway has been discussed for decades, and recently, both Senators Schumer and Gillibrand have expressed support for the project. (When the Senators asked North Country leaders what they’d like their representatives to go to bat for in Washington, they responded with the highway.) Opposition to the idea has been consistent and effective from organizations like the Adirondack Council; the combination of opposition and the price tag in the billions seems to have weakened the Senators’ willingness to advocate assertively for it.

This all should serve to make the big “if” of the North Country Highway even bigger. It would indeed be ironic if in the name of economic development, communities along the U.S. 11 corridor went the way of Port Henry.

New economic development attracted to the North Country by the highway would likely have just been drawn from other regions of New York State, or even from neighboring municipalities in the same county or region. And even if the road did attract, say, 1,000 jobs along its length, the estimated $4 billion price tag the North Country Highway would mean $4,000,000 per job (not including maintenance and upkeep costs). Is this worth it—compared to other economic development strategies we might employ, such as needed improvements to Route 11 and investment in the quality of the cores and economies of the communities along it?

Many tout the construction and maintenance jobs created from such a massive new road project. Sure, there’s short and long term people-power needed to build and maintain a 172-mile, four-lane highway. But such jobs can be created wherever we decide to put the resources—meaning that we could also create a significant number and quality of jobs to maintain and improve U.S. 11 and its communities.

Adding to the dubiousness of the North Country Highway is the fact that it would level serious environmental impact on the forests, fields, and wetlands of the North Country—just a few miles from the “Blue Line,” the boundary of the Adirondack Park, the east’s greatest wilderness.

Mobility is not the only variable in economic development. Whipping through does not guarantee stopping by.  As we plan for the economic revival and prosperity in our rural regions, we can’t take the chance of making things worse by investing billions in new highway infrastructure for at best a zero-sum-game. Four billion dollars could go a long, long way to making U.S. 11 a better, safer roadway, to improving the cities and villages of the region, to bringing broadband to the North Country, and to protecting the agricultural land and enterprise that is the true lifeblood of rural communities.

In Field of Dreams, the Voice says, “If you build it, he will come.” As we take our communities into the future, we owe it to ourselves to use instead the question form of this line: “If we build it, will they come?”  In the case of I-86, we have already invested heavily in a big if. In the North Country, we still have the chance to put our scarce resources in the right places.

by Evan Lowenstein