By Jennifer Edwards
The Cincinnati Enquirer

LIBERTY TWP. - As environmentalists Monday blasted the accuracy of an air quality test conducted for a proposed interchange here, Butler County officials scrambled to gain support from Warren County leaders in time for a crucial vote on the project Thursday.

Mason Mayor John McCurley appeared last week at a public hearing on the interchange, saying his city wouldn't support the project unless Butler produced a plan to improve Mason's secondary roads. Mason's two-lane "horse and buggy" roads, Mr. McCurley said, already are packed and can't handle the flood of vehicles the interchange would bring.

On Monday, Butler and Liberty leaders began drafting a letter of intent for Liberty to enter into a Joint Economic Development District (JEDD) with Mason, Commissioner Mike Fox said.

The regional transportation board Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments (OKI) will vote Thursday whether to put the proposed Liberty interchange on a long-range project list. Placement on that list is a necessary step before state and federal officials will approve the $8 million project.

To be eligible for the list, the interchange cannot worsen air-quality in the area and funds must be available for the project. The interchange has passed the air-quality test, OKI staff members have said.

But in a letter Monday to OKI board members, Mike Monett of the Dayton Sierra Club urged them to reject the project Thursday because, he said, the test wasn't conducted on the entire plan.

The test studied only the interchange itself - not its impact on the entire 655 acres of commercially zoned land that will be linked with the proposed interchange by way of a Cox Road extension. Cox Road now ends at Hamilton-Mason Road but is planned to hook with the interchange about a quarter of a mile east from where the highway now ends and eventually run to Ohio 63 in Monroe.

"The proposal is not just for the tiny spur south but also for a new road north, at least 1.6 miles long and possibly as long as 3.4 miles!" reads the letter. "Perhaps at a later date the real model for the actual development planned at the end of the (interchange) ramps will be input and analyzed. And maybe, by some miracle, it will be found not to worsen (the air)."

Butler and Liberty leaders are pushing hard to get state and federal approval for the interchange. Liberty saw a 147 percent population increase in the last decade and soon will be filled with new homes if more commercial development doesn't emerge soon, officials say.

Mr. Fox ripped the Sierra Club's conclusion the air quality study wasn't accurate, pointing out it met the federal requirements for such tests.

"The Sierra Club is so anti-growth they are conflicted by the growth of the trees," Mr. Fox said. "They constantly want to change the rules to advance their liberal social agenda, and they're a rag-tag group of philosophical misfits leftover from the 1960s. If they want to advance that agenda, for goodness sake, they should go to San Francisco, where they will be welcome."

But Warren County's OKI representative, Commissioner Larry Crisenbery has voted against the interchange in the past and said he would again this week unless Mason and Liberty officials worked out a written agreement to improve Mason's secondary streets.

"To get my vote, the letter should be in hand by then," Mr. Crisenbery said Monday.

Mr. Fox pledged to get a letter to Mr. Crisenbery by Thursday. But if Mr. Crisenbery doesn't vote for the interchange, Liberty will enter into a JEDD with either Hamilton or Monroe and leave Mason out, Mr. Fox vowed.

"I have no desire to enter into a partnership with someone who is trying to kill the project," he said. "We made the offer to go with Mason for the JEDD purposely to try to build a bridge of trust and to forge cooperation between Warren and Butler County and to get Warren County's support. We made it very clear that we weren't going to fool around with it and that the condition of that JEDD was contingent upon them supporting the project."

Under JEDD agreements, earnings taxes from commercial developments and businesses in a geographic area (in this case, in Liberty) would be set aside for road improvements and other infrastructure.

JEDD's must involve a city or town and a township.

Tax-increment financing would pay for the interchange. But Mr. Fox says there won't be enough money left in the financing fund to upgrade secondary roads.

E-mail jedwards@enquirer.com.