Thursday, May 15, 2008

Toll road delays and overruns

Shocking!

WFAA Channel 8 reported last night that the tollroad in our floodway is behind schedule and overbudget from what we were promised last year during the referendum. Might cost more than $2 billion according to the report (that's up from $1.3B in November). Thing is, this is exactly what the Vote Yes folks had been saying. And as Angela Hunt points out in her interview in the report, we don't know who is going to pay for these overruns. Will it be the tollway authority? Leppert claims the city has capped it's commitment to the road. I don't think I've heard that from anyone else.

As Schutze notes, Gene Rice of the Army Corps of Engineers was very noncommital on the timelines for this road. They don't even have an environmental impact statement yet. I have my fingers crossed that the impact statement will shut down the road portion of this project. Putting a road in a floodway is not only dangerous for increasing the risk of flooding, it's also bad for the wetlands in the floodway. I don't know if that is considered in this study or not. But perhaps we'll have an administration that puts a spine back in the EPA before they're ready to start moving dirt.

1 comment:

Big Tex said...

I'm with you - the tollroad was a dumb idea, and I'm personally convinced that the only reason it passed is because of the confusing way the ballot was written.