The Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance Asheville Hotel was full of activity. Dozens of people were milling about, examining maps on posters and TV screens, reading pamphlets and peppering state transportation staff with questions.
The topic: the Interstate 26 Connector, a seven-mile highway project that has been in the works since the late 1980s. The northern part of the project is expected to cost $1.2 billion, the largest transportation contract in state history.
The sprawling project — which would link I-26 in southwest Asheville with US 19/23/70 in the city’s northwest — has been debated for decades.
Last week’s open house hosted by the state Department of Transportation, which is overseeing the plans, marked the first community meeting on the project since 2018.
Residents had a lot of opinions.
In one part of the room, Asheville resident James Wornall chatted with Asheville City Council member Bo Hess about the project. Wornall, a military veteran, grew up in North Asheville and moved back in 2022.
“I have mixed feelings about the project. I’m enthusiastic about having less gridlock … However, the idea of the project crossing over Patton Avenue where it does is not appealing to me,” Wornall told BPR.
The latest plan is for I-26 to pass over, rather than under, Patton Avenue west of the French Broad River. But that’s not what residents agreed to in an earlier proposal spearheaded by local architects and planners and approved by NCDOT in 2018.
Wornall was one of several community members who told BPR they were hoping to hear from NCDOT staff about options for redesigning the overpass.
“That’s not what’s here right now. It’s more like, ‘This is the project that you’re going to get, whether you like it or not,’” he said.
In another part of the room, Nathan Moneyham, the NCDOT’s chief engineer on the project, fielded questions from reporters and some very well-prepared attendees.
“At the stage we are, obviously, we're under contract,” Moneyham said. “We're in the construction and the final design phase. So we're very, very late in the process. So, a lot of decisions have already been made, and there's not a ton of flexibility. We do still value the feedback.”
The earlier proposal would have had I-26 go under Patton Avenue, creating a pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly boulevard that supporters say also would have been welcoming to local business development. Instead, the department opted for a flyover option, going over Patton Avenue.
A surprise announcement
Archer-Wright Joint Venture, which won the contract for the northern section of the project, included the flyover in its plans last year. NCDOT said it approved the plan because it will cost less and be quicker to build.
But the design wasn’t made public until early this year due to what NCDOT has described as the “highly confidential” nature of the bidding process.
In February, state transportation staff gave an update on the project during a meeting of the French Broad River Metropolitan Planning Organization. During public comment, urban planner Joe Minicozzi spoke out against the design.
“Somehow, this highway got changed from in the pit to up over the top of a local road, and that’s – I don’t know why that’s happened,” Minicozzi said during the meeting. “It doesn’t seem like it was made with the spirit of all the past plans. … And I hate to see my own community shoot itself in the foot this way.”
Minicozzi is a co-founder of the Asheville Design Center, which played a key role in drafting the original proposal. He said the flyover plan will increase sound pollution and bring down property values.
A petition urging against the redesign has garnered more than 1,700 signatures since it was launched a few weeks ago. Residents have also formed a group called Citizens’ Coalition of West Asheville to advocate for the return of the underpass design.
At last week’s open house, some residents said they’re not fans of the overpass but that the overall positives of the Connector project outweigh the negatives.
Elisa Stanley, a massage therapist who lives in West Asheville and works in North Asheville, said she was “kind of on the negative side” of the changes but came away from the open house with a better appreciation for the benefits, including decreased traffic on the Jeff Bowen Bridge, a new bridge on Haywood Road and a multi-use path along Riverside Drive.
“Do I love the big loop around? No,” Stanley told BPR. “And I don’t want us to become like a Charlotte where it’s that concrete, snaking effect. … But we are growing. And we need to accommodate that growth, because our infrastructure here does not.”
The overpass is just part of the plan. NCDOT said about 40 homes and 28 businesses will be demolished to make way for the northern part of the project. While that’s lower than the 2018 estimate, some residents said they’re concerned about the impact on their neighbors and their own property.
Among them was West Asheville resident Sammi Burke.
“My property is partially impacted by the project, but four of my neighbors are total acquisitions,” Burke said. “They’ve owned their homes for 30-plus years and are now being bought out. One of which, in the 2018 maps, was not considered an acquisition, and now in the updated figures, it shows that their house will no longer exist.”
Burke said it was good to be able to meet with staff in person to talk about the timeline and next steps, but she still has many unanswered questions.
“I know progress has to move forward,” she said. “But I think we’re all feeling very stressed and concerned about making sure that everybody’s taken care of, especially considering the market is the way it is in Asheville.”
‘We don’t live in Atlanta’
Asheville’s Burton Street neighborhood will feel the change if the plan is executed. Residents of the historically Black community were displaced by the construction of Patton Avenue and Interstate 240 in the 1950s and 60s, and the I-26 Connector is expected to lead to further displacement.
Real estate agent Grace Barron lives in the neighborhood. She said the I-26 project has been looming over the community for the past 30 years.
“It has a huge disparate impact on historically Black communities and is a continuation of urban renewal, which I think is really ironic considering Asheville claimed they were going to give reparations to people and then didn’t do that, but instead are just taking homes from Black landowners,” she told BPR.
For years, the community has worked with the city and NCDOT on plans to mitigate the impact. But Barron said she still feels like residents’ power is limited. She wants the state to focus on more urgent priorities, like dedicating more money toward helping Asheville rebuild homes and bridges that were destroyed by Hurricane Helene.
“And so, I feel very confused [about] why our dollars would be allocated to this,” Barron said. “We don’t live in Atlanta. Like, we don’t need a bajillion-lane highway situation. It seems way out of the scope of what Asheville is as a city.”
One of the unanswered questions is whether the project — especially the Patton Avenue overpass — is a done deal.
Council member Hess said he’s invited NCDOT staff to a City Council meeting in May to address the lack of transparency surrounding the decision. He said City Council’s power is limited since it’s a state project. But he hopes the process can be slowed down so that Asheville residents can have a greater say.
“This is part of that process,” Hess told BPR. “And we do still have time. But I encourage everyone to write their state representatives … come to the council meeting where DOT is presenting and make your voice heard.”
Moneyham, the NCDOT engineer, said the state is willing to work with the city on things like lighting and aesthetics under the flyover.
But anything more than that?
“Where we are, really, is any significant change — like an overpass going to an under — is such a schedule impact that it would … really jeopardize where we are in the standpoint now, which is a fully funded project that we can move forward with,” Moneyham said.
Ultimately, Moneyham said any effort to change the overpass to an underpass would require working with a third party to relocate utility lines, which could delay the project by at least 15 months – or perhaps indefinitely.
“This is really what we see as the opportunity to move forward and get this project constructed so that the benefits to the surrounding area can be seen from a traffic operation standpoint, but also it does a lot of great things for the city,” he said.
If the I-26 Connector moves ahead as planned, it’s expected to be completed in 2031 — more than 40 years after NCDOT first proposed the idea.
The NCDOT is accepting public comments on the project’s current phase of development through May 25. You can submit a comment online here, by email to i26connector@publicinput.com, or by phone at 855-925-2801 (enter project code 11368 to leave a message).
