Description:
In early 2013, the City of Burlington, in partnership with the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission and in close cooperation with the Vermont Agency of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration, initiated the Railyard Enterprise Project (REP). The REP aims to address multimodal safety, mobility, and operational transportation issues and to advance economic development opportunities in the southern waterfront area of Burlington by improving access and mobility through new urban streets. The REP followed an enhanced scoping process under FHWA’s Every Day Counts/Planning and Environmental Linkages (EDC/PEL) initiative. The result of the REP Scoping Study was the selection, by the Burlington City Council, of three REP alternatives to advance into preliminary engineering and permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a process required for using federal funds to finance transportation projects. This REP Supplemental Scoping Study is a follow-on to the REP Scoping Study and its goal is to further refine and evaluate one of those alternatives, Alternative 1B, and to explore the feasibility of implementing the project without federal funding, using state and local funds only, thereby needing to conduct a complex, lengthy, and costly NEPA process.