The Cahaba River Society and the Black Warrior Riverkeeper environmental groups have already been trying to put pressure on the transportation department to mitigate environmental damage from the plan, the thinking being that with Republicans in control of the White House, both houses of Congress and the statehouse, the road planned for economic development purposes, not traffic relief, was inevitable.

"It's not inevitable now," says Brantley Fry, a spokeswoman for the Riverkeeper group.

With the Democratic Party taking over control of the U.S. House and Senate, the party will also take over the leadership positions on every committee in Congress, including the powerful transportation appropriations committees and subcommittees in the House and Senate.

While the Birmingham Business Journal has reported that the millions of dollars to build the project should be forthcoming as long as U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby and U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus hold key positions on those committees, they are now in the minority and may not be able to deliver the pork in this case.

The new ranking member and most likely chair of the Senate Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee is Patty Murray of Washington State, an avowed environmentalist. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana is also on the main committee, and her press secretary says she may be open to looking at moving some of the money to projects needed in that hurricane-ravaged state.

Murray's counterpart in the House on the Highways, Transit and Pipelines subcommittee of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is James L. Oberstar of Minnesota. A spokesman for the subcommittee said he was the ranking member and most likely new chair in the 108th Congress.

The state transportation department, formerly the Alabama Highway Department and long the most corrupt agency of state government dating back to the days when four-term Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace used the department's budget to reward political cronies, held a so-called public hearing at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Center Point last Thursday.

But even in George Wallace's day, when the department held a public hearing, it would take the form of a town hall meeting with a formal presentation of the plan and an opportunity for the public to comment at a microphone. Sometime in the past few years, someone in Montgomery decided that democracy was too messy a form of government for such things, so there was no real public hearing in this case. Nine employees of the department were positioned around the room at three different maps to answer the public's questions one-on-one. A sign up sheet and comment form were passed out, with about one-third of one sheet of paper provided for public comments.

This is what passes for democracy in Gov. Bob Riley's Alabama in 2006? Back during the 1980s, the highway building process was cleaned up legally in the state when then-Sen. Perry Hand, a Republican from Gulf Shores and an engineer by trade, rammed new gas taxes through the Alabama Legislature and earmarked the money specifically for road construction.

That so-called public hearing last week had to do mostly with preliminary plans for a 4.5 mile span of the proposed highway from Brookwood Road east of Alabama 75 to Old Springville Road and Goodner Mountain Road.

Even transportation department spokesman Brian C. Davis, the only representative authorized to speak to the press at the meeting, said the plan is not ideal.

In an ideal world, he said, the highway would connect to I-59 near I-459 west of Trussville, which would form a more perfect loop around Birmingham.

But you know engineers. He said it would be too hard, disruptive and expensive to cross through Center Point near the Jim Skinner Ford dealership and Edwards Lake Road, or even at Sweeney Hollow Road. It's much easier to take the beltline loop out in the country around Gardendale and Palmerdale and cross over Old Springville Road, even though there's already an exit at Dearfoot Parkway there, which dumps traffic out at the small town of Clay.

The only real traffic bottlenecks east of Birmingham occur at rush hour at the second Trussville exit, which also dumps traffic onto Sweeney Hollow Road and Old Springville Road.

Davis said there is not enough available right-of-way to widen Sweeney Hollow Road, which is used by commuters heading for Highways 75 toward St. Clair County and 79 toward Blount County. And he claims the department has plans to "mitigate" any environmental damage from the new road.

But Ms. Feemster, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, say the route being pushed now is "the most environmentally damaging plan," since it takes the new highway through all the headwaters of the Cahaba River and many of the tributaries to the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River.

"Everybody knows the headwaters are the most vulnerable part of any river system," she said.

Beth Stewart, the executive director of the Cahaba River Society, said building the highway out so far from the city will just create more suburban sprawl.

Bob Sargent, a bird expert who lives in Clay, said many people will lose their homes and property to condemnation, which would be a "major loss," he said. But since "the road was going to be built one way or the other," the community will benefit from the "upgraded road system and new easy access to a major highway. Safety on the roads is a major concern for all of us who live here."

Since the road is not now inevitable, due to the changes in Congress imposed by the voters, the citizens groups who oppose it plan to fight on.

Davis said the transportation department is open to new building and mitigation techniques, citing North Carolina's recent highway development in the environmentally sensitive areas near Grandfather Mountain as a source of information for how the construction might proceed.

Warrior Riverkeeper Nelson Brooke wonders, however, why the highway is needed at all.

Since the transportation department does not even deny that the project is being pushed for "economic development" purposes, not to alleviate traffic problems, he and others wonder if there are powerful landowners involved in property speculation along the new highway, perhaps with connections to the powerful in Montgomery.

As with any new highway development, there are winners and losers. Alabama history is filled with examples of the rich getting richer by buying property near new highway interchanges. There have been some pretty big names involved in this in the past, from Garry Neil Drummond to George Barber to Jimmy Faulkner.

Perhaps that is an issue worth investigating by the Democrats with their renewed positions of power in Washington.

Map photo by Nelson Brooke

A map of the proposed new northern beltline Interstate highway around Birmingham