There are still loose ends from the big fight over the cross-base highway that provided high political drama last week.

For one thing, the potential for lawsuits against the highway hasn't gone away. As part of a last-minute deal Friday that averted a meltdown on a regional roads & transit ballot plan, environmental groups agreed to hold off on a lawsuit against the highway pending mediation efforts in 2009 – after Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg leaves office.

Unreported at the time, however, was the fact that one group, Conservation Northwest split off from the environmental coalition and said it would press forward with a lawsuit. Here's an explanation from Jasmine Minbashian, the group's spokesman:

You are correct that Conservation Northwest did not sign the agreement. We wholeheartedly support improving the transportation infrastructure in Pierce County, but felt that the agreement reached last Friday was not a real solution or even a step forward because it did not identify a viable alternative to building the highway across the prairie.

We also felt that the agreement only defers the debate and decision over the highway by a few years when a solution exists today. In our view, this is surely the best way to waste everyone’s time and money. Avoiding and deferring these hard decisions will only drag this process out longer. All the groups in our coalition (including those who have signed the agreement) have made clear that we cannot support building the highway across the last and best fragment of oak-woodland prairie left in Puget Sound. I am certain that our position will not change two years from now when mediation is set to begin.

Conservation Northwest would rather fund and work towards a more realistic solution today, such as the one originally proposed by Bunney and others and adopted by the RTID board, rather than wait two years to come to that same conclusion. Again, we see this delay as an irresponsible waste of time and money.

We were party to the sixty day notice and we do intend to move forward with litigation.

The 60-day notice Minbashian mentioned was a November court filing by cross-base opponents signaling their intent to challenge the Federal Highway Administration's approval of the highway. I'll report more detail on that filing in future postings.