Upriver Widening Gets A Little Rocky County Pulls Draft Plans That Pinpoint Location Of Coyote’S Rocks

Upriver Drive could become the road to complete befuddlement for Spokane County engineers.

The latest confusion appeared this week when county engineers removed from Valley libraries a document detailing their plans to widen Upriver Drive.

The document shouldn’t have been made public because it pinpoints the locations of Native American cultural sites, said David Leehow of the Federal Highway Administration.

The Spokane Tribe was concerned about the public release of culturally sensitive information, Leehow said.

Leehow conveyed tribal concerns to Spokane County earlier this week in an e-mail suggesting the documents be removed from public locations.

The Spokane Tribe’s attorney, Dave Lundgren, said the tribe would not comment on the issue.

“It’s very confusing,” said Gary Nelson, the engineer in charge of the project. He had assumed the public was included in the long list of state and federal agencies that will comment on the county’s proposal.

Leehow doesn’t fault the county for making the document public. He said the regulations are unclear, and that nowhere does it specifically prohibit the document from being made public.

The cultural sites are protected under Federal Highway Administration rules, which are in place to shield them from vandals.

“It’s been a challenging project,” Leehow said. “I wouldn’t sit in the position of faulting anyone along the line.”

Faulty communication between Spokane County, state and federal agencies, and the tribe has been part of the $1.1 million Upriver project from the beginning.

The county wants to add paved shoulders and a pedestrian path to a half-mile stretch of the road below Riblet’s Mansion in the Spokane Valley. The project would give pedestrians and bicyclists a way to get from the Centennial Trail to the nearby Plante’s Ferry Park.

The problem was that Spokane County never checked with the tribe when designing the project.

It wasn’t until construction was about to start in December 1997 that the county realized the the widened road would harm Coyote’s Rocks, a Native American cultural site on the National Register of Historic Places.

Coyote’s Rocks is made up of large basalt boulders on both sides of Upriver Drive. According to tribal history, the rocks ended up there as a result of a battle between Coyote and Bear.

The discovery of the site’s significance halted the project.

Because the county project would disturb Coyote’s Rocks and at least one other nearby archaeological site, the Federal Highway Administration required the county to prove that no other alternative would work and that everything possible had been done to minimize harm to the area.

To do that, the county had to prepare a document known as Section 4(f). Spokane County has written five 4(f) drafts over the past three years.

The latest draft was the one removed from libraries this week. Nelson said that when he went to pick up the copies, librarians said some people had already been in to look at the document.

It’s unknown how the proposed project will be received by the tribe and other agencies.

The county’s preferred alternative for Upriver looks nearly identical to the one halted three years ago, with slight shifts in the alignment of the road.

Comment deadline is mid-January.