URBANA – Laurel Prussing, never known to shrink from a fight, isn't about to back down from her insistence that the entire Olympian Drive project – from Apollo Drive to U.S. 45 – must be built.

The Urbana mayor said Friday that she wants the road built all the way to U.S. 45, even though several Champaign County Board members indicated Thursday that they would support construction only to Lincoln Avenue.

"No, we're committed to doing the whole project, and now it's just a question of timing," said Prussing, the No. 1 backer of the road proposed as a connector between Interstate 57 and U.S. 45.

"We don't have a problem with the (construction) order being from the (Canadian National) railroad tracks to Lincoln, and then doing Lincoln and then going to 45," she said. "But after all the planning that has gone into this and all the need there is for this road, I don't think that just two couples who moved in should be able to dictate over a very open public-input process that has gone on for years."

The two couples who are attempting to block the Olympian project, Prussing said, are Leslie Cooperband and Wesley Jarrell and Bill Cope and Mary Kolantzis.

"This whole project has been very carefully studied," she said. "Nothing has changed. The streams are the same. The land is the same. The only thing that has changed is these two couples who came to work at the University (of Illinois) and decided to locate right near where the road is going to be."

Several county board members said they believed they had established a bipartisan consensus at Thursday's meeting that the project should be focused on extending Lincoln Avenue north to Olympian and building Olympian east to Lincoln. That would require amending an agreement with the state that gave Urbana $5 million for the Olympian project.

Dave Speicher, local roads engineer with the Illinois Department of Transportation office in Paris, said state officials would consider a change to the grant if local state legislators requested it.

"What I'm hearing from other board members," Urbana Democrat Brendan McGinty said, "is that we can work it, we can do this, we can potentially redirect the money."

"I think there are a goodly number of Republicans who will support Lincoln Avenue," agreed Champaign Republican Alan Nudo.

But Prussing said she believes Champaign-Urbana residents want the entire project, which would cost approximately $30 million, to be built.

"County board members who are arguing against this road are arguing against their own constituents," she said. "This should not be Republican versus Democrats. It should not be urban versus rural. It's like, what is in the best interests of the majority of the public?"

Urbana Democrat Steve Beckett said he supported the full project, all the way to U.S. 45. He said it would be a "bait and switch to the developers and owners who invested on the west side of the tracks with the intergovernmental promise that this road was being built across the tracks," and would connect to U.S. 45.

Prussing, meanwhile, criticized fellow Democrat McGinty for working for a revised Olympian project.

"There's support for this in Champaign and Urbana," she said. "It's unfortunate that McGinty, who is a representative from Urbana, has abandoned Urbana's interests in favor of Laura Huth's clients."

Huth, a former Urbana City Council member and onetime Prussing ally, is a consultant for a group opposed to the project.

McGinty said Friday that he regretted Prussing's remarks.

"That's discouraging," he said, "but my eye is on the prize, which is real economic development up in that area that everyone can get behind. When we go out to 45, it will be because people want it and because it makes sense to do it."

Another public hearing on the Olympian Drive project will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Urbana Civic Center, 108 E. Water St., U.