The public comment period for New York's plans to replace Interstate 81 in Syracuse ended at 5 p.m. Thursday.

About three months ago, the state released its $2 billion proposal to replace the aging span of highway. It includes taking down a portion of I-81 and rereouting thru traffic to I-481, which would be widened to between four and seven lanes to accommodate increased traffic.

The proposal also includes the building of a roundabout next to an elementary school, which Lanessa Owens Chaplin, assistant director of the Education Policy Center at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said is her number one concern with the state Department of Transportation's plan.

“It’s alarming to a lot of community members, and it’s alarming to us as an organization,” she told Capital Tonight.

According to DOT spokesman Glenn Blain, the Department of Transportation is currently reevaluating the proposed location of the roundabout near the Dr. King Elementary School, based on input from the public.

Currently, the viaduct is about 250 feet away from the school. In the DEIS, the DOT proposes building the roundabout 100 feet away from the school.

“Which means there’s going to be 36,000 cars going by this elementary school per day,” Chaplin explained.

While roundabouts typically slow down traffic, to Chaplin, vehicle speed is not the issue. 

“Generally speaking, roundabouts are a good thing. However, you don’t want any major intersection 100 feet from an elementary school,” Chaplin stated. “The idea is to move it 5 or 600 feet away so it creates a safety buffer, not only for their physical safety, right? But also for their emotional safety, for their health. We don’t want them to be exposed to that much air pollution.”

Some good news has come out of the roundabout issue. Chaplin said that once the situation was explained to them, many more community members became engaged in the I-81 project.

“That’s made them come out in droves and numbers to pretty much tell the DOT that the roundabout has to go,” she said. 

According to DOT’s Blain, the department has so far received more than 3,000 comments on the DEIS to date, but comments are still coming in. Indeed, Chaplin told Capital Tonight that her organization alone planned to send 2,000 additional comments into the DOT before Thursday's deadline.

A final tally of public comments will be released by the DOT sometime next week.

Chaplin said there have been “great” improvements from the 2019 preliminary draft, but there’s still more work to be done. For example, she would like to see the DOT detail how the land will be used after construction.

“It’s a major concern for community members. They want to make sure they’re not going to be displaced or the area is not going to be gentrified, meaning they can no longer afford to live there,” Chaplin said. “So, one of the big issues is how are we going to control the development in that neighborhood.”

One such hope is that Syracuse implements a community land trust to steer the development of land reclaimed from the highway.

According to Chaplin, the DOT has created a community land working group to look at the issue.

“I think there’s a lot of areas [the DOT] can improve on. I think they are willing to do that but that they need some more nudging to get it done,” Chaplin said.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this article stated 5,000 additional comments were being sent to the DOT. It has been updated to reflect the actual number of 2,000.