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City-parish officials are negotiating rights of way for the planned $40.2 million connector between Picardy Avenue and Perkins Road, a Green Light Plan project aimed at relieving traffic in one of Baton Rouge’s most heavily congested areas.

The connector isn’t scheduled for construction until 2020, but Walter Monsour, chief administrator for East Baton Rouge Parish, says the project could be started much sooner if most of the right of way is donated as anticipated. Once the right of way is secured, Monsour said it is conceivable they could begin engineering in the next two years and construction could begin soon after.

The project, which will offer an alternate route to Interstate 10 and Perkins Road, calls for a 5,000-foot, four-lane connector that will include a raised median, sidewalks, a new bridge crossing Dawson Creek and an underpass at the Kansas City Southern railroad crossing with retaining walls.

Green Light Plan Program Manager Brad Ponder says they’ve started negotiating a right of way with JTS Interests, which is developing Perkins Rowe, a 60-acre mixed-use development under way at Bluebonnet Boulevard and Perkins Road. Ponder says they’re working out right-of-way width, length and timetable on the segment of land from Perkins Road to Dawson Creek.

A conceptual, or preliminary plan, for the connector has been posted on the Green Light Plan Web site, although Monsour says the location of the bridge crossing has not been decided. He says possible location for the near $1 million structure could be near Dunham School on Roy Emerson Drive to help ease school traffic.

“It is one of the alternates that we are considering,” he says. “When we move toward engineering it’ll be decided, but we’re interested in doing that to afford the school another outlet as a safety factor for the kids.”

Monsour says where the bridge will go depends on where the road will go, which will be influenced by the right of way and engineering.

Dunham School headmaster Robert “Bobby” Welch says they hired Steve Wallace with ABMB Engineers, who has children at the school, to assess the feasibility of connector routes to ease school traffic, which currently goes through Wimbledon Estates to Perkins Road. While their plan is not final, Welch says they are preparing a presentation on possible routes to get input from city-parish officials and neighboring landowners with a vested interest in the project to help formalize their proposed access to the connector.

“We’re anxious for them to be aware of what we’re considering because we think it would work at everyone’s benefit,” he says. “We’re trying to facilitate something that makes sense for everyone.”

Welch says they would like to see the connector built as closely to Dawson Creek as possible and the bridge cross from Backcourt Drive at the north corner of the school campus behind Wimbledon Estates. He says a cost figure won’t be available until they finalize the proposed route, but he emphasizes the route being closer to the school also would help ease traffic in Wimbledon Estates and the Settlement at Willow Grove.

“The school, since it’s private, is often seen as ineligible for assistance from the public arena even though our parents are taxpayers and live in the community,” he says. “We feel like there are a lot of people here affected by whatever happens to the school. We owe it to them to see if we can maximize this process. To us, it seems to be a matter of common sense to direct the traffic away from the subdivision and more to the Picardy-Perkins connector and to the interstate.”

Gary Losey, president of the Wimbledon Estates Civic Association, says his group does not oppose the project. But, he says, more than 200 residents have signed a petition saying they oppose the subdivision tying into the proposed connector, which they maintain could worsen traffic in an already congested area. Their petition also states they would oppose closing Rod Laver Avenue, oppose removal of a landscape buffer on developer Tommy Spinoza’s property and would oppose eliminating left-hand turns off of Perkins Road into their subdivision.

Metro Councilman Pat Culbertson says one of his objectives with proposing the connector was to give school traffic another route from the neighborhood as opposed to it coming through Wimbledon Estates.

“The finances for that bridge have yet to be worked out,” Culbertson says. While the school has other options to access the connector without a bridge, he says, the most beneficial route would extend directly off school property to a bridge to the connector.

Culbertson says city engineers estimate the connector could take as much as 30% of traffic off the Perkins-Bluebonnet intersection.

Ingolf Partenheimer, chief traffic engineer with the city’s Department of Public Works, says the connector would relieve traffic on Bluebonnet Boulevard, which averages 45,000 vehicles a day, and Siegen Lane. He ranks it in the top 10 of Green Light Plan projects in need.

“With the connector, you’re giving drivers more options on which way to go,” Partenheimer says. “People will distribute across the area rather than have one choke point at Bluebonnet [Boulevard] and I-10, and on the other wide, Siegen [Lane] and I-10.”

Overall, Ponder says Green Light Plan projects are not late, but they are still contending with post-Katrina issues like rising prices, material availability and skilled labor shortages.

“We’re still paying the price of the hurricanes and we just don’t know how stable the market is,” he says. “With rising and falling oil prices, you just don’t know from one bid to the next if your bids will be higher or lower.”

An indication of what to expect in higher project costs may surface when the bids for the $6.6 million Veterans Memorial Boulevard extension near Metro Airport, the first Green Light Plan project to enter construction since the hurricanes, come in September, Ponder says.

“We’re hoping that things are better than what we’re forecasting, which is up to a 30% increase in project cost,” he says. “We anticipated the increase and increased the entire program cost by about 30%, but now we’re hoping it’ll come in less so the difference can be routed to other projects.”

Total anticipated cost for Green Light Plan projects is $500 million. To cover it, Louisiana voters approved a 23-year extension of the gross receipts tax to the year 2030.

Green Light Plan work overall is based on prioritization and as funds come available through bond sales. Ponder says the most recent $125 million bond issue is funding engineering for several projects and construction of six projects; another $160 million bond sale is scheduled mid next year; two more bond sales are likely between next year and 2012; and then work goes to a pay as you go basis.