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Deanna Rife, left, and Marsha Hultsman are worried about their Crafters Market and the effect of the Oregon Department of Transportation’s pending decision on the Fern Valley Road interchange. (Mail Tribune / Bob Pennell)

PHOENIX — Just weeks after a meeting to further review four design options to replace the failing Fern Valley Road interchange, members of the Phoenix Association of Business and Property Owners are demanding that their design be deemed the only "sane, sensible, viable and affordable solution."

With another meeting scheduled Aug. 2 with the Oregon Department of Transportation, the association posted an open letter on its Web site (www.phoenixunited.org) in recent weeks and paid for an advertisement containing the full letter in today's Mail Tribune.

Written by Lenny Neimark, a voting representative on the citizens advisory committee that will ultimately help choose the final interchange design, the letter borrows a Ronald Reagan quote about government bureaucracy by repeatedly referring to ODOT as "a big baby with no sense of responsibility." Neimark's letter demands that two of four interchange options be dropped entirely. They would widen Highway 99 through town, bulldozing several businesses.

ODOT officials declined to comment on the letter, though ODOT spokesman Gary Leaming noted that two members of the business owners association --- Tani Wouters and Neimark --- have a vote in any decision regarding the interchange design.

"These are two representatives from the business association who are also part" of the citizens advisory committee, Leaming said. "We follow a prescribed process to keep the politics out of selecting an alternative. There's a matrix of criteria you follow. As a team, you use that criteria and your own best judgment on what is best for the community. The bottom line is we're going to work this through the process that's prescribed. We owe that to the community and to the teams that have been working on this so hard for two years.

Wouters, president of the business group, said the focus of the letter was to officially state the position of business owners who had grown weary of the process.

"We've been making these demands from the beginning," Wouters said. "We've been told by ODOT that they cannot afford (the two designs the business group opposes), and yet they still continue to keep them on the table.

"We've come up with an alternative that they say works, and we just feel that we're wasting so much time and taxpayer money when we could really kind of break through all the bureaucracy."

While the project has been under review for two years, little public interest came until January, when business owners united to contest the pair of potential designs for the $40 million rebuild.

After an outcry from business owners, ODOT area manager Art Anderson said at the time that ODOT agreed to "take a few steps back." In the months that followed, two additional design alternatives were presented, one created by the business association and ODOT engineers.

While the newest alternative has been deemed most affordable, final details have yet to be worked out and ODOT officials are bound by state and federal guidelines regarding how to proceed.

Wouters said she and other business group members were alarmed by the rescheduling of a July 6 meeting of the citizens advisory and ODOT project development teams.

But ODOT rescheduled the meeting because of a conflict with the July 4 holiday, Leaming said, and to allow ODOT engineers time to finalize details of the two newest design alternatives.

Wouters said she was told by ODOT project manager Debbie Timms that ODOT "needed time to identify fatal flaws in our alternative."

"Is that just a generic term?" Wouters asked. "For the rest of us that don't speak 'ODOT,' maybe that should be better explained, because it sounds like they're trying to pick apart our design."

With the next meeting slated for August, Wouters said she would continue to request that the two oldest designs be yanked.

Terry Rombach, owner of Goofy's Furniture and a business association member, said the letter on the association Web site "speaks for itself."

"I just think it's time to get the ball rolling in some positive direction," Rombach said. "We've got a proposal that we put on the table that is a very viable, very workable proposal.

"If we've got a say in the process, and they say we do, what's taking so long? It's like if you're not standing there right in ODOT's pocket, you have no idea what those people are up to or what they're thinking. That's scary for business owners trying to make a living — maybe this letter will put a fire under somebody's butt!Â""

Buffy Pollock is a freelance writer living in Medford. E-mail her at buffypollock@juno.com.