Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Tear in my beer

Doesn't. Look. Good.

In my prediction yesterday, I forgot to account for a very important election truism. Old people vote. I dropped by the polls with my wife this afternoon. Lots of olds. I hate to sound ageist - this is probably in no way fair or politically correct. But if all those 20 and 30 somethings who signed those petitions had bothered to actually vote we'd have a different story tonight.

Not sure if that's the only factor I left out. Maybe more people are swayed by threats and lies than I thought. Apparently we're not quite ready to shift our thinking from more roads and sprawl to more density, mass transit, and protecting green space.

At any rate the Corps of Engineers still has not signed off on this road. Looks like we probably failed to kill it today at the polls. But maybe we can keep the pressure on the Corps to do the right thing and stand by their own rules: No new dirt inside the levees and no excavation allowed. That would make it awfully difficult to build an earth bench for our new highway to sit on.

Failing that, welcome to Big D's version of The Big Dig. $1.3 billion and counting for 9 miles of road in our floodway.

2 comments:

Kevin L. Richardson said...

I was disappointed to see the pro-toll win. Just makes Ft. Worth more appealing everyday.

I wonder if part of the issue is that the people of Dallas don't yet feel a need to protect land on that scale. Maybe there is still a feeling that, like the oil of the 1800s it is infinitely abundant.

Hiss to scary ladies and bad votes.

Brian said...

Dallas is all about bidness. And protecting green space does not help bidness (at least if you're rather short sighted) whereas better transportation does. I think that is the overriding theme here.

The silver lining is that a grass roots campaign with all but one of the region's political leaders against it and with an 8 to 1 funding disadvantage and with the daily newspaper against it managed to garner 47 percent of the vote.

I'm hanging onto that and hoping that the winds of change are blowing through our town. There are good people here that want to find 21st century solutions to our problems and want to protect green space. I think we'll be hearing more from them in the future.