In 1988 Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) engineers proposed that US 30 be rerouted and upgraded to a four-lane controlled-access expressway through a portion of Lancaster County. The American Farmland Trust (AFT) opposed the plan because, according to Jim Riggle, then Director of Operations at AFT, it "would have cut right through the heart of the best farmland would probably have been the death knell of the Amish community." The plans were averted when more than a thousand Old Order Amish, people who do not usually participate in the public process, "drove their buggies to the meeting hall and expressed their concern by simply sitting quietly in the audience in their black homespun suits."