Friday brought the good news that the state Board of Transportation approved the draft Transportation Improvement Program, which includes $98.9 million in funding for Durham's East End Connector. Over the next few years, NCDOT is scheduled to finish the planning for the road's alignment along with environmental impact analysis and to acquire right-of-way in advance of road construction, which is set to begin in 2012. The short (less than 2 mile) project is scheduled to open in 2013.
In case you haven't been following the project, the EEC is the missing-link connector between the Durham Freeway (at the inflection point where the road turns away from RTP and towards downtown) and US 70's freeway portion leading to I-85 and North Durham. (See this earlier post for more on the EEC.)
This is an incredibly important development for both the health of Durham's urban neighborhoods and for the long-term growth of both the city and county. The Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) had ranked this as its highest priority through the formal planning process, as had both city and county leaders in formal and informal ways. The vote by the City Council back in early February to support city staff's recommendation that the so-called Alignment #3 be selected for the road was a further form of support for NCDOT's proposal (which leaned heavily towards that alignment as displacing the fewest residents and having the lowest construction cost.)
Of course, Durham being Durham, the East End Connector has gotten dragged into the oldest and messiest politics of all: the age old black-versus-white debate. The speakers during February's City Council meeting were divided almost evenly among racial lines, with residents from some of Durham's well-off urban neighborhoods supporting the EEC in the face of opposition from the East End Avenue, an historically African-American neighborhood where seven or eight homes would be impacted or taken to build the road.
Is this the Durham Freeway all over again, as Rev. Sylvester Williams and other East End Avenue community leaders would like to portray? Not exactly. The way I see it, the EEC is actually a key step in saving Durham's historically black neighborhoods, especially many that are historically less-advantaged than East End, along Alston, Avondale, and Holloway in eastern Durham.
Continue reading "Durham's East End Connector: Not a black-and-white issue" »


Downtown Durham, Inc. has reported that Durham has been ranked #1 out
of all the metropolitan areas in the US for highest percentage of
workers in the "creative class." The rating, from the statistician who
does reports for
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