The final, 18-mile section of Interstate 99 that opened in November in Central Pennsylvania was not built quickly and it was not cheap. At $631 million, this section of I-99 was nearly twice as expensive as anticipated and took at least four years longer than expected to finish. Along the way, it seemingly had something...
PORT MATILDA, Pa. — It has been called an economic engine, Bud Shuster’s Roller Coaster and an enabler of suburban sprawl.
Whatever it is called, the final, 18-mile section of Interstate 99 that opened in November in Central Pennsylvania — connecting Interstate 80 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Interstate 76, for the first time — was not built quickly and it was not cheap.
At $631 million, including $83 million to clean up toxic pyritic rock that was the result of a 35-million-year-old meteor impact, this section of I-99 was nearly twice as expensive as anticipated and took at least four years longer than expected to finish.
Along the way, it seemingly had something for everyone to dislike: Environmentalists were upset with its impact on wetlands, streams and wildlife; taxpayer watchdog groups thought it was too expensive and unjustified; and advocates for highway construction were upset by its name.
“Here’s a case of where you had a politician with a very personal goal of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in his district while the nation’s infrastructure was crumbling,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, which has long cited I-99 as an example of pork-barrel spending at its worst.
But that has not inspired any regrets from the man everyone credits with making it happen.
“Well, it’s going to save lives and create jobs and certainly create more convenient traveling,” said former Rep. Bud Shuster, a Republican who was the chairman of the House transportation committee in 1995, when he won approval for the financing of the last section of I-99.
“It’s going to be a boon to this region of the country,” said Shuster, who left office in 2001. “There’s nothing mystical about this; this is what happens when you replace an antiquated roadway with a modern four-lane highway.”
An unconventional name
Shuster did more than just secure financing.
First, when he was told the highway would officially be considered a “spur” connecting I-80 and I-76 and would have to be named something like I-876 or I-280, he resisted because, he said, it was not “catchy.”
So, reaching into his childhood memories of the old rickety streetcar, No. 99, that took people from his hometown of Glassport, Pa., to McKeesport, he wrote into law that it would be called I-99, believed to be the first time that was ever done.
That violated the highway-numbering protocol the federal government usually uses for interstates that requires north-south highway numbers to rise from lower in the west, such as Interstate 5, to higher in the east, such as Interstate 95.
Interstate 99, some 80 miles long, was originally an expansion of U.S. 220 that was begun in the early 1970s. The final section had long been considered too expensive and difficult to build.
More controversially, Shuster also included a rider in the bill intended to speed construction by letting it bypass federal environmental oversight.
“That was the worst part of it,” said Larry Hagg, president of a coalition of local environmental and sportsmen’s groups that sued over the lack of such oversight. “We might have avoided some of the problems if the federal government had been involved from the beginning.”
Local officials said the improvements in safety and convenience are unquestioned, compared with the overburdened local two-lane roads that I-99 replaced.
The stickier question is whether it will be the economic boon that Shuster had hoped for in a region that has been hit hard by the loss of industrial, mining and railroad jobs in the past 50 years or more.
“We haven’t seen a lot of it happening,” said Bob Jacobs, director of the Planning and Community Development Office of Centre County, through which I-99 passes. “But it could increase commercial and industrial development; we just don’t know when.”
John Coleman Jr., president of the Chamber of Business and Industry of Centre County, said at least one proposed development, the Benner Commerce Park, is a direct result of the highway.
Centre County is better off than much of the region thanks to the presence of Pennsylvania State University, but little of that prosperity has spread to surrounding counties, which have been losing population while Centre has grown.
Change for the worse?
Many believe I-99 could change that, but not necessarily with good results.
“This highway spur will probably spawn a series of bedroom communities all along these interchanges,” said Gary Thornbloom, chairman of the local Moshannon Sierra Club, which is concerned about sprawl.
The coalition of sportsmen and environmentalists opposed the I-99 route, which goes up and over Skytop Mountain, just north of Port Matilda. It wanted the highway to cut through the valley 900 feet below, where it would have had less of an environmental impact.
By deciding to go over the mountain, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation cut into an acidic pyrite rock formation. The department had anticipated that, but its studies had failed to accurately calculate how much pyrite there was, and how “hot,” or acidic, it was.
“Initially, they just didn’t grasp what they had on their hands,” said Barry Scheetz, a civil-engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University who was later called in to study the rocks. He found that the formation, a result of the meteor that created the Chesapeake Bay, was so acidic that when exposed to air and water, the runoff had the pH level of battery acid.
Hope for the future
The state spent two years and $83 million digging up more than 1 million cubic yards of the pyrite-laden rock and created a lined landfill next to the highway, mixing a larger-than-normal amount of limestone in to neutralize it and covering it over.
While the debate over I-99 continues, Dan Weaber, 49, who lives in Port Matilda and runs a tree-removal business, has made up his mind.
“You used to not even be able to get through this intersection in less than 20 minutes,” he said. “Now it’s easy. I think it’s the best thing that ever happened here.”
Mark Belinda, who bought the Port Matilda Hotel and Tavern in 1993 in anticipation of the new highway, is not so sure. “I think it’s going to take longer for this corridor to bloom,” said Belinda, 47. “It took so long to get done, I think investors took their money elsewhere. But I’m still hopeful.”
