Betsy Parmley stood under the Interstate 81 overpass in Syracuse, where she has parked every workday for the past 18 years.
Under the peeling green bridge paint familiar to all Syracusans, she spread her arms as if on stage. Four lanes of cars and trucks rumbled overhead. Built in the 1950s and ‘60s, the bridges reached the end of their useful life in 2017. They will have to come down.
“This is where you can imagine the magnitude of it,” she said. “This will all be rebuilt.”
Parmley, 45, is the new engineer in charge of the reconstruction of I-81 in Syracuse.
The girl who played with Erector sets and Legos will now oversee the biggest transportation project in Upstate New York history. She replaces Mark Frechette, who retired after seeing the project through a decade of planning.
The state and federal governments have settled on designs to tear down the I-81 overpass, bringing slower traffic to street level and sending high-speed traffic around the city on Interstate 481. The project is in a national spotlight with a mission that goes beyond moving traffic. The direction comes from the top – President Joe Biden uses it as an example – to serve justice to the neighborhood destroyed when it was built.
It will be Parmley’s job to make sure the job is done on time and on budget and with sensitivity to social justice. It will take at least six years. The price tag is $2.25 billion.
Parmley oversees a team of 11 employees and a crew of contractors too numerous to count. It is typical to look at 60 faces in a virtual meeting, she said. Her annual salary is $147,000.
Her first challenge is one she can’t discuss because she is a party to a lawsuit. An opposition group has sued the state and federal governments in an effort to stop the plan to build a community grid in place of a high-speed highway. A state judge has ordered the state to conduct three more studies — on air, water and future traffic patterns — before tearing down the overpass. The federal lawsuit has not yet been heard.
State Supreme Court Judge Gerard Neri’s order allows construction to begin on the first contract, which intends to build out I-481 to handle more traffic. Parmley expects to break ground on that contract this spring.
Parmley is not new to the arguments for and against the community grid and the other options explored by her predecessors over the years. She has worked alongside Frechette in recent years as a project manager.
She shared maps and listened to pros and cons from people who attended open houses. She read most of the 8,000 comments submitted through the formal process of environmental review. She wrote some of the responses.
The success of this project hinges not just on efficiency and cost-management, she said. It will be in helping people understand and visualize what is about to happen.
“My job is not to change someone’s mind,” she said. “It’s to educate people. It’s to tell them the who, the where, the how. I’ve learned in my career and my time with DOT, it’s not always what we say, it’s what we do that’s important.”
The idea of sending traffic to street level through 1.4 miles of downtown Syracuse is fearful to some, confusing to most. It is hard to imagine new exits and new paths to take to work, hospitals and the JMA Dome.
The biggest misconception, she said, is that I-81 will disappear all the way from the northern interchange with I-481 to the southern interchange with it.
Traffic will go to street level only from Van Buren Street to I-690. And there will be new gateways to downtown, including a new exit from I-690 at Crouse and Irving avenues.
“I think there’s still that misunderstanding that they’ll have to drive through hundreds of traffic signals or something like that,” she said. “If anything, we’re providing more avenues for people to get where they’re going.”
Parmley grew up in Danbury, Connecticut and graduated from Bucknell University, in Pennsylvania. She lives in Pompey with her husband, Bryan, a financial planner. They have two children.
Bryan is the son of former State Police Maj. James Parmley, who was named U.S. marshal for the Northern District of New York in 2002 by President George Bush.
Parmley said her father-in-law suggested she try for a job at the state Department of Transportation.
She came to the department in 2005 as a junior engineer after working for one year at Clough, Harbour & Associates.
Parmley was the first woman to serve as resident engineer in the Central New York region, leading a staff of 40 highway maintenance workers for the western half of Onondaga County.
For the last five years, she has led the DOT’s Central New York Traffic Safety and Mobility Group.
In these roles, she handled the kind of on-the-ground customer service jobs familiar to any driver who has been concerned about a driveway with no permit or a snow-plowing issue or an unsafe pothole. She spent a lot of time driving, looking for problems to fix or send up the chain for a bigger redo.
She also got to know the town supervisors, mayors and code enforcement officers who needed to coordinate big development projects.
Parmley has overseen several visible projects in the Central New York region. She handled the $38 million renovation of the New York State Fair’s Orange Lot, $10 million in highway improvements near del Lago Casino and a $7 million project to connect the village of Solvay to the fairgrounds.
In 2021, she started following Frechette around as project manager on I-81. While he handled the big picture, she handled the details of the final design and procurement of contracts.
In January, the state awarded the first contract – a $296.4 million contract with a team called Salt City Contractors, LLC.
Parmley said civil engineering was always a natural fit for her.
“I always loved to be outside and building things,” she said.
Parmley said her college engineering program was split about 50-50 among women and men. But across the country, only 14% of working civil engineers are women, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Parmley said she learned from role models, both male and female, how to communicate inside work and with the public. Her boss, Regional Director Dave Smith, is a straight shooter who can talk engineering in plain terms, she said.
Sharon Graboski, her first supervisor at the DOT, taught her how to get her ideas across. It started with learning the details and checking your work, she said.
“You have to know the details. You have to be the engineer that people will go to,” Parmley said. “Then be able to explain it maybe in a less technical way.”
And do people come to you for details? a reporter asked.
The question gave Parmley an opportunity to embellish. She chose honesty, even if it was awkward and wrecked her own anecdote.
“I have to say, not so much anymore,” she said.
Now, she’s the boss.
Read more about I-81:
After a mixed decision in court, NY sticks to plan to remove I-81 through Syracuse
Video: See how new I-690 exits will change commute to Syracuse University, hospitals, dome
What can Syracuse learn from Rochester about rebuilding a neighborhood split by a highway? 7 tips
How much are taxpayers spending to keep I-81 in Syracuse safe before NY tears it down?
I-81: Upstate NY’s biggest highway project is about to start, but maybe not where you think
See maps of construction in the Syracuse suburbs
Why an I-81 ‘skyway’ would be costly and unworkable: ‘Who wants to live under a 70-foot bridge?’
Michelle Breidenbach | mbreidenbach@syracuse.com | 315-470-3186.
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