Gateway Connector Called Invitation to Sprawl for Illinois Counties
Smart Growth OnLine
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=6135&State=14&res=1280
2 July 07

Although the state's three counties just across the Mississippi River east of St. Louis, Missouri, have recorded only a half-percent population growth to 558,098 since 1970, including 2.76 percent in the past six years, some people insist the rural area needs more highways and want to extend 11-mile Route 158 from Monroe and St. Claire counties some 18 miles northeast to Troy in Madison County, writes Stop 158: Citizens for Smart Growth group activist Richard P. Ellerbrake in the Madison-St. Clair Record, considering the proposed Gateway Connector outer beltway to St. Louis' southern Jefferson Barracks Bridge unwarranted and certain to invite sprawl.

''Sprawl,'' he warns, ''threatens us with its insatiable appetite for ever more taxes, public services, schools, fuel, (increasing) traffic accidents and threat to the environment, while the same number of people occupy more and more land at higher and higher cost.''

The U.S. Census Bureau figures he quoted show that most of the population change in the St. Louis Metropolitan Statistical Area, including the three Illinois counties, ''is internal movement,'' he points out. ''What looks like growth isn't. It's rearranging the chairs, and trading in rocking chairs for highchairs.''

Noting that the three counties' population ''has gone up or down slightly from year to year,'' without a big jump up that could make the calls for an outer-belt connector more plausible, he stresses, ''Stop 158: Citizens for Smart Growth believes it is important to know the facts so we can plan a future together based on reality, not myth.'' --