That corpse in the Trinity is beginning to rot

I'm still convinced the Trinity River Toll Road will never be built and this revelation today is the first sign that the project is (pardon the pun) dead in the water.

The problem here is that Da Mayor's announcement to the City Council today is based on the supposition that the testing will find no major problems with the levees -- that once the testing is finished and minor repairs are made, construction on the road can begin, albeit 20 months late. Give me a break.


In what may seem like an unrelated action, City Council committees are meeting today to learn how the city plans to reduce the economic development and public safety budgets to help bridge the $190 million gap in the overall budget. Now comes news that:

• The city must come up with an addition $29 million (which means $29 million in additional cuts elsewhere) to fund this study; and


• It must come up with untold millions more when the repairs to the levees the study identifies must be made.

At some point the city is going to have to decide what's more important -- maintaining the standards of the streets we already have or building this damn boondoggle in the middle of a floodplain that will not serve the people of Dallas, only those transients traveling through our city. Add to that the fact that the construction of the toll road will have to be suspended until the city finds the funds required to fix the levees and then makes those fixes (I'm guessing that will be completed by 2020 at the earliest), sensible minds will have realized the stupidity of this entire endeavor.


Let's concentrate on (1) protecting our downtown from the prospect of catastrophic flooding and then (2) creating a first-rate park in the heart of our city and abandon this foolhardy plan of a toll road ripping a scar through the middle of that park.