News

Top DOT engineer seeks a path to save projects

Brian Burch, the top NCDOT engineer for southwestern North Carolina, spoke to a homeowner when the agency unveiled N.C. 191 widening plans.

By Bill Moss, Published: March 30, 2018

When they got their first look earlier this month at plans for the widening of N.C. 191, many homeowners reacted with anger, bewilderment and a blood vow to do everything in their power to stop the project.

In other words, it was a typical day in the life of Brian Burch, the top engineer in the southwestern North Carolina for the state Department of Transportation. However negatively they may view the state’s transportation projects, residents can’t fault the Division 14 engineer for evading the public. There was Burch amid the mob again, patiently fielding questions, trying to address concerns and stoically serving as a punching bag for taxpayers who question the validity of the project.
From Flat Rock to Laurel Park to Hendersonville to Mills River, Burch, his subordinates and the consulting engineers who are designing highway construction projects are set upon by dozens — sometimes hundreds — of opponents. Flat Rock Village Councilman John Dockendorf observed recently that as intense as the opposition has been to a Highland Lake Road widening project, four other projects have received even more negative comments. If property owners are the critics, the reviews, it seems, are almost universally negative.

As the chief engineer for the 10-county Division 14, Burch is responsible for 614 NCDOT employees, 4,983 miles of roads, an $89 million maintenance budget and 60 active road contracts ranging from $2 million to $850 million. He lives in his hometown of Hayesville with his wife, Kelly. Their twin daughters Alyson and Emma are juniors at UNC at Chapel Hill and daughter Gracie is a junior at Hayesville High School. In his spare time, he enjoys running, church activities and spending time with his family.
During his day job, Burch is in charge of receiving comments, working with property owners and elected officials and shaping a compromise that keeps a project going forward.
Although roadwork opposition is not unique to Henderson County, Burch acknowledges that it’s more robust here, in part because so many have reached the construction stage at once.
“It is more intense and I think that’s because we have these projects that are impacting communities,” he says. “They are in areas that have a lot of residential housing. We’ve not had a tremendous amount of projects in Henderson County in the last several years. These are all new. It seems like we’re not just hitting one or two areas in Henderson County. We’re hitting almost every community. If you look at it, we have more in Henderson County than we do anywhere else. Fortunately, we have a great relationship with local government there and they have been very responsive in their communities and working with us in trying to find solutions.”
If the vocal, well-organized and persistent opposition to every one of the NCDOT projects on the drawing table here frustrates him, he does a good job hiding it. City and county officials who have been working with him on the projects praise his communications skills and flexibility. Elected officials in Hendersonville, Flat Rock and the county Board of Commissioners, for instance, applaud his willingness to compromise on the Kanuga Road widening, which became much thinner when he agreed to scrap bike lanes and sidewalks.

Projects start at local level

Burch points out that every project in the pipeline here has come from local government to the NCDOT, not the other way around.
“All these projects went through the process of prioritization,” he says. “These were projects the local government supported and the DOT supported. You want to deliver the local vision. We don’t want to deliver a project that the local government says is not close to what we envisioned.”
It’s possible that the NCDOT will do what opponents have been urging on the Balfour Parkway, Kanuga Road, White Street, U.S. 64 and Highland Lake Road projects — walk away.
“‘Do nothing’ is always an alternative that we consider in every project,” he says. “That’s something that’s always looked at, and we do realize that if ‘do nothing’ is selected as the alternative there’s typically consequences to that and sometimes congestion does increase and gets worse. Another possibility is (the road) continues to have safety concerns and those for me at least are harder to accept than congestion. I can accept congestion if that’s what the people’s desires are but when it comes to safety I have a harder time just saying we can ignore those.”
Even with the intensity of opposition, Burch says he and his agency don’t feel that they’ve exhausted all the potential compromises that would make the projects more acceptable.
“There is a possibility that at some point the public and local officials say, ‘DOT, we really don’t want these projects, we’ve changed our minds,’ and at that point we’ll have some discussions to see if ‘do nothing’ is an alternative that we can live with,” he says. “But right now on all these projects we’re not at that point because I don’t think we’ve adequately considered and addressed the concerns that we’ve received from the public. We’re going to do all we can to accommodate these requests and try to reduce impacts as much as possible.”