"Let's stop fooling around and wasting money," said Davis County Commissioner Dan McConkie, one of more than a dozen elected officials from the area to speak. "Let's build this road and build it now."

But longtime opponents urged highway planners to examine their "smart-growth alternative," which would destroy fewer acres of wetlands near the Great Salt Lake.

The five-hour hearing and open house, sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Utah Department of Transportation, follows the release of a new court-ordered environmental impact study. If built, Legacy would include a four-lane highway, along with bike and equestrian trails, stretching from Farmington to Salt Lake City west of Interstate 15. UDOT also would create a 2,000 acre wetland preserve west of Legacy.

Davis County residents expect the project to ease gridlock, while opponents decry its environmental impact and say it will only induce more sprawl.

A 2001 lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, Utahns for Better Transportation and Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson halted construction when the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals demanded planners re-examine five areas: the width of the road; mass transit; the impact on wildlife; and sequencing, which means the order Legacy, commuter rail and an expanded I-15 are built.

Three more years of study leaves UDOT saying their first plan is still the best, though engineers did make some modifications. In a draft of the new study released in early December, UDOT said it would shave 16 feet from the road's median. The plan also calls for more coordination with commuter rail, which is expected to start running from Salt Lake City past Ogden in 2007. According to the environmental study, the planned route is the most preferred and has negligible impact on the area's ecosystem.

Anderson's environmental advisor Lisa Romney disagreed: "The Legacy Highway proposal still includes the wrong configuration, the wrong location and the wrong sequencing of transportation options."

Anderson supports the alternative created by the Sierra Club and Utahns for Better Transportation, which calls for the expansion and widening of Redwood Road up to Bountiful, making it a six-lane, Bangerter Highway-like road, without as many stop lights. Redwood Road would then hook into a widened frontage road, which also would be expanded into Farmington.

The groups plan to analyze their alternative with the same computer models the government used on Legacy. Once that is complete, the proposal will be officially presented to the highway administration and Utah's transportation department as part of the formal comment period, which ends March 4.

mcanham@sltrib.com