Where's the money?

The Dallas City Council's Trinity River Corridor Project Committee is scheduled to be briefed Monday on what city officials want Cesar Chavez Riverfront Boulevard between Cadiz and Continental streets to look like sometime in the utopian future (defined by me as when all the lakes are in the park and when the high-speed tollroad has been replaced by a sensible parkway).

You really can't get a good picture of this future from this briefing (it wasn't nearly as well done as a similar briefing outlining the future of I-30 east of I-35 a year or so ago), but it does look expensive, especially in these times when money is tight. Finally on page 31 of the 33-page briefing is the cost breakdown. I'll save you the touble of looking for it - the construction costs are estimated to be $54.5 million (in today's dollars) of which, surprisingly enough (at least to me) it claims $40.6 million are already pledged. The majority of that, however, is $29 million that's supposed to come from tolls collected by the North Texas Turnpike Authority, which sounds pretty iffy to me.

Construction, according to the briefing, is scheduled to begin in November of 2011 and to be completed two years later.

The final page of the briefing contains the words "Questions and Discussion." Yeah, I have a few questions, like where's the other $14 million (which will obviously increase the closer we get to construction) going to come from and just how secure is that $29 million from the NTTA.