Forget about that 100-year flood nonsense

For years I've been hearing things like the levees along the Trinity River must be built to withstand something close to the 100-year flood, so named because the chances of such a catastrophe are so rare, it would only occur, at most, once every 100 years.

Bunk.

I have absolutely no scientific research to base this on and, even if I did I probably wouldn't understand it (science was never my strong subject), but I think we need to completely throw out this all-too-rare flood business. I am convinced that global warming is having a drastically negative effect on our climate. Winters are becoming colder, summers hotter, storms more intense. Weather extremes are widening. I don't recall in my lifetime a tsumami of the intensity that struck Sumartra in 2004. Now another one has ravaged Japan just seven years later. Look how much more intense hurricanes have become in the last three years.

So forget and abandon this 100-year flood business. I expect one to hit us within the next 20 years, at the latest. And then another one less than 10 years after that. So here's my message to the Corps of Engineers: Re-calculate that 100 year flood to say, at best, a 15-year-flood, and make sure our levees are built to withstand that kind of constant barrage. Our lives and our livelihoods depend on it.

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in the utopian future (defined by me as when all the lakes are in the park and when the high-speed tollroad has been replaced by a sensible parkway).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.

Adios, toll road

Right after voters approved the Trinity River Tollroad, I predicted I would not live long enough to drive the blasted thing. Now it's looking like I will not even live to see construction started on this ill-conceived project. The story starts out by saying it's all about the levees, but midway through readers will discover the real problem: It's all about the money, or rather the lack of it.

You take the high road and I'll take the low road, but ain't no one taking a new road

According to Sam Merten at the Dallas Observer, there was a lot of opposition to all things concerning the Trinity River Corridor Project at last night's fourth and final City of Dallas Budget Frustration Exercise. Which again proves how little the local citizenry knows about how their local government works. For one thing, the overwhelming majority of TRCP funds come from bond monies already approved and it would be illegal to divert those funds anywhere else. OK, so maybe you can cut some staff from the office, but I guarantee you those staff members would wind up working someplace else at City Hall, so there's no savings there. And if you're talking about the infamous Toll Road that's designed to permanently scar the park? Well, if I read this correctly, there's mounting evidence that the dang thing is never going to be built anyway. The NTTA simply doesn't have deep enough pockets.

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.

Tomorrow's Trinity Toll Road hearing

I almost wish I could be at tomorrow evening's public hearing that will seek input into the location of the Trinity River toll road or whether the road should even be built in the first place.

I have been an opponent of this boondoggle from the very beginning for several reasons:

1. Just like you wouldn't build a high-speed thruway through New York's Central Park, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, Los Angeles' Griffith Park, London's Hyde Park, you shouldn't build one through what should become Dallas' signature park. Can you imagine the uproar in East Dallas if someone proposed building high speed toll bridge over White Rock Lake? Can you picture the backlash in South Dallas if someone said we needed to construct a freeway through Kiest Park?

2. We should be concentrating on finding ways of getting people to Dallas, so they can spend their sales tax dollars here, not through Dallas, which this road does.

3. I am against any new transportation option that does not include a major rail component.

4. It will add more cars to our roadway infrastructure, more impurities to our air.

But this hearing is not going to be dealing with transportation ideology, I'm guessing, so none of the above would prove to be valid arguments there. However, I am hoping someone brings this to the attention of the feds.

Will Mr. Go stop the Trinity River toll road

A half century or so ago, Congress passed something called the River and Harbor Act of 1956 that authorized the construction of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal or, "Mr. Go," as it is referred to by the folks living in New Orleans. The purpose of the canal was to provide a more direct route from the inner harbor of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico than the winding, twisting Mississippi River. Construction was completed in 1965.

But things didn't go as planned. Erosion widened the canal from its original 650 feet to its present average width of 1,500 feet. Not only that, the canal is not even being used. On average, one ocean-going vessel a day uses the short cut, which costs $13 million a year to maintain. But that's not all.

Three months before Hurricane Katrina struck, Hassan Mashriqui, a storm surge expert at Louisiana State University called Mr. Go a "critical and fundamental flaw" in the hurricane defenses prepared by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After Katrina struck, an engineering investigation and computer modeling revealed Mr. Go intensified the initial surge of water by 20 percent, raised the height of the wall of water by three feet and increased the velocity of the surge from three per second to eight feet per second. "Without MRGO, the flooding would have been a lot less," Mashriqui says. "The levees might have been overtopped, but they wouldn't have been washed away." Levees along Mr. Go were breached in 20 places along its length during Katrina, directly flooding most of Saint Bernard Parish and East New Orleans. The storm surge along Mr. Go is also said to be the cause of the three breaches in the Industrial Canal.

Here's where the plot thickens. It's almost impossible to sue the federal government over collapsing levees. Something called the Flood Control Act of 1928 prohibits suits against the United States for damages resulting from floods or flood waters. However, last month U.S. District Court Judge Stanley R. Duval Jr., who ruled in January 2008 that the Corps of Engineers was immune in a federal lawsuit directly related to the levees and flood wall failures during Katrina, has now said he will hear a suit by property owners on the canal's contributions to the flooding. He based his decision on Graci v. United States, a 1971 ruling that said there is no immunity for flooding caused by a federal project unrelated to flood control. And Judge Duval ruled, Mr. Go was built for navigation, not for flood control.

Which brings me back to our local Trinity River toll road which is being built for transportation, not for flood control. We've already heard from the Corps that our levees are unacceptable. Using the Mr. Go precedent, couldn't the Corps consider the toll road a potential legal liability just waiting to happen? I know if I was an attorney advising the Corps, I would be hesitant in telling it to give an OK to the toll road inside the Trinity River levees.

Mr. Go, meanwhile, is coming to a stop. Late last year, the Corps began dumping rocks into the channel to permanently dam it. It is expected to be completely closed by this summer.

I'm sorry, Mayor, but I just don't understand your reasoning here

On his Transportation Blog today, Michael Lindenberger of the Dallas Morning News had the following quote from Da Mayor concerning the levees and the proposed toll road in the Trinity River Corridor Project:

The genesis of this project was improving flood protection. So from the start, we fully expected that the components - including the Parkway - would be a part of that fix and must enhance the level of flood protection for Dallas. That planning must not stop because it only will delay the fixes longer. For instance, the Parkway component will enhance flood protection along its length with a wider and higher levee.

Someone needs to explain to me in language that I can understand (admittedly, that means simplistic) how the toll road will "enhance the level of flood protection for Dallas." At the same time, tell me why you need a toll road in order to have "a wider and higher levee."

This is going to require more than a thumb in the dike

The Dallas Morning News, on its transportation blog, contains an item today about yesterday's release of the Army Corps of Engineers' inspection report of the Trinity River's levees and its headline asks "Does this mean the Trinity toll road can't be built?"

What kind of question is that? Anyone reading the Corps' report should be asking only one question: "What must be done to protect downtown Dallas from a Hurricane Katrina-like catastrophe?" Any other questions pale in importance to this one.

City officials have repeatedly told us the levees are designed to protect us against a flood that only has one-eighth of 1 percent chance of hitting the city. That's an epic flood, an Old Testament belly washer. However, what this latest report shows is that our levees can't even protect us from a 100-year flood, the kind that hits ... well, the last one of this magnitude hit Dallas 101 years ago. Uh-oh!

Wait a minute! It gets worse. A team of experts reviewed the corps' findings, found them accurate and then added they weren't sure the levees could withstand the flooding that occurred here in 1990.

Now the city claims we shouldn't have to worry about that because the levees today are 14 feet higher than they were in 1990. Wrong argument. The concern is not that the water will crest over the top of the levees; the concern, according to the corps' report, is that the cracked earth found throughout the levees mean they won't hold and the water will come crashing through them.

Here is the section of the report (found on Page 55) that really bothered me:

"The semi-arid, windy environment found in the North Central Texas area renders the highly plastic clays that comprise the levees prone to desiccation. As a result, desiccation cracks are the usual conditions for the Dallas Floodway Levees. These cracks frequently extend deep into the levee cross-section, both parallel and traverse to the levee crest, and are believed to be a significant contributing factor in the development of shallow slides of the levees; more than 300 of which have occurred since the USACE completed reconstruction of the levees in 1958. It should be noted that although referred to as 'shallow' slides, these slides are generally deeper than what is considered 'normal' for most shallow slides. This is due to the deep desiccation cracks that develop in the moisture deficient embankments. Slides as deep as 15' are reported to have occurred after cracks have become filled with water. ... Examination of the moisture contents of levee samples obtained by USACE in 2004 indicates more than half of the samples had moisture levels less than the plastic limit. These samples were found at depths just below the levee crest to more than 30' -- essentially the full height of the levees, so deeper cracking is theoretically possible. The standardized Inspection Checklist used for Periodic Inspection indicates that any cracking deeper than 6' feet deep is considered to be 'Unacceptable'. Under this criterion, it will be a long-term challenge (emphasis mine) for the 23 miles of Dallas Floodway levees."

Here comes the hard part. How does the City fix this? The Corps lists three methods, two of them stop-gaps, one a permanent fix. If the City is serious about the long-term protection of its citizens and its core downtown area, it needs to go with that permanent solution:

"To accommodate desiccation cracking, the existing levees could be replaced with structural walls (T or L-base walls). Alternatively, structural walls or barriers (diaphragms) could be incorporated into the levee cross-section. Each of these options is very expensive (again, emphasis is mine), but they are alternatives that could be properly designed and constructed to enhance the integrity and performance of the protective works as mitigations for the desiccation cracking."

Less than a month ago, I sat in a banquet room at the Lakewood Country Club to hear Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm deliver her latest "state of the city" address and she said ... and this is an exact quote ... "The Trinity River Corridor Project is first and foremost a flood-control project." If that's so then here's what the City of Dallas must do and must do immediately:

Forget about the Calatrava bridges, the chain of lakes, the toll road, the promenades, the overlooks, the soccer fields, the jogging paths and everything else that was supposed to be part of this project and put all available resources into fixing those damn levees and fixing them now!

Because here's what happens if those levees are not fixed: If the Corps finds that the levees are unacceptable, that would mean Dallas would not be eligible for any federal disaster relief assistance if and when The Big One comes.

What scares me is that the City may instead decide to fight the Corps findings, instead of fixing the problem. According to this Morning News report, "specialists hired by the City will spend weeks, and probably months, investigating whether the flaws found by the inspection are as bad as the corps' worst-case fears would indicate. The City will also hire a firm to begin assessing the levees in an attempt to convince the U.S. government that they can withstand a 100-year flood."

Oh, that makes me feel a lot more secure.

Angela's prediction and remedy

Dallas City Council member Angela Hunt, who has led the fight against the idea of placing a toll road between the Trinity River levees, is predicting that in the year 2014 the Dallas City Manager will finally announce the toll road project dead. But, by that time, she claims:

Trinity levee improvements have not been completed. Not a shovel of dirt has been turned to bring the Trinity Park to life, and no lakes exist within the floodway. Now that plans for the park have been all but scrapped, the residential and mixed-use developments once planned along Industrial Boulevard have been abandoned.

But it doesn't have to be that way, she writes in today's Dallas Morning News. She has a Plan B "premised on eliminating the toll road from the Trinity River floodway." You can read all about it here.

"We can no longer allow the toll road's delay and uncertainty to prevent Dallas from moving forward in addressing our transportation and flood control needs and in fulfilling the promise of a great park," she writes. "Plan B will allow us to finally realize the dream of the Trinity River project ... I hope our city leadership will recognize the need to chart a new course, one that fulfills promises rather than defers them. "

I have had my philosophical differences with Ms. Hunt, but on this matter I agree with her completely.

Once upon a time, Rasansky might have made a difference

Mitchell Rasansky, as mentioned here earlier, is starting to go negative on the Trinity River Toll Road and, according to Sam Merten at the Dallas Observer, the District 13 Dallas City Council member had this to say today about the project:

"Let me tell you, if I do not see that we're going to have the funds to build the tollway -- I am only one of 15 -- I am not going to support this at all."

Yawn. Who cares? Back when he was semi-relevant, Rasansky had the staff of City Hall quaking at his every utterance. They were collectively scared to death of this one individual, even though he was only one vote on the Council and usually did have the support of any of his colleagues. Yet this staff bent over backwards to accommodate and placate him.

But (and thank you, G-d, for term limits), the man is gone in a little over two months. And I don't think he's going to be capable of returning from the dead to haunt the council and the city staff once he's gone. And, as far as I've seen so far, both of the leading contenders to replace Rasansky seem to be an approvement, although one of them certainly needs to do better with his misleading campaign mailers.

What, me worry?

The Dallas City Council's Trinity River Corridor Project Committee is scheduled to be presented with this briefing --an update on the Trinity River Parkway (why they don't call it what is really is -- a high-speed tollway, not a parkway -- is beyond me) at its meeting Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. I found the briefing fascinating for what it does not say -- I saw no mention of either levees or money in it, presented by, of all organizations, the North Texas Tollway Authority. The Q&A following the presentation could be interesting, especially if committee member Mitchell Rasansky continues in his ornery ways. He is emerging, after Angela Hunt, as the most outspoken council critic of what the City and other government agencies are attempting to do between the levees in the Trinity River. My money is still bet on "the dang thing will never be built."

It's simply great mate waiting on the levee

I received the following e-mail blast today from City Council member Angela Hunt:

"I was very concerned to see that the U.S. Corps of Engineers have deemed the safety of Dallas' levees 'unacceptable.' The Corps revised their safety standards after the Katrina tragedy, and re-evaluated Dallas' levees under this new system. They announced the results of their review yesterday.

"I was surprised that our levees failed to meet the new standards since the Mayor just got back from lobbying our Congressional delegation to pressure the Corps into speeding up their safety evaluation of the Trinity toll road, which is to be built within the levees. If you've been following this issue, you know that no major road like this has ever been built within a levee system. Knowing that our levees do not meet the Corps' new safety standards, I think it's irresponsible to lobby the Corps to speed up what should be a thoughtful, deliberate safety review of an untested engineering design like the toll road. Rushing to pour millions of tons of concrete into an already unsafe levee system is a dangerous plan that could have dire consequences.

"In light of the Corps' safety analysis, it is clear that we need to fix our levees NOW. Not next year, not five years from now, not after a catastrophic flood, but today. But the toll road is holding up our levee improvements. We fix all the safety problems with our levees until the design of this toll road is completed. As long as the toll road is part of the equation, all those parts have to be built to work together, and if we don't have the design for the road, we can't plan the design for the levees, and we certainly can't start fix them.

"The fact is, this toll road project is dead. There's no funding for it. Despite the Mayor's assurances during the Trinity referendum to the contrary, the NTTA just admitted that the toll road is facing a billion dollar funding shortfall. If the Corps is allowed to do their job without political manipulation, the toll road will likely face even more delays as a result of their new safety review. If we continue on this course, if we ignore the obvious warning signs and stubbornly plow ahead, the safety needs of our levees will continue to languish and be held hostage by this white elephant of a toll road for years to come. The dirt will not fly. The Mayor's 2013 deadline for toll road completion will come and go, the toll road cost will double again, and the funding gap will increase exponentially. In another ten years, 2019, future city officials will reluctantly admit that putting the toll road between the levees is not a viable, fundable option. The toll road will finally die with a whimper, and we will have wasted twenty years and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars without the levee improvements we so desperately need. It's time to change course and admit today that this toll road won't work, and find a better way to address our transportation needs without delaying or compromising the safety of our flood levees."

I wish I could share Ms. Hunt's view that the toll road project is dead. I distinctly heard City Manager Mary Suhm tell the Dallas City Council today "The toll road will be built" and the money is available to construct it. I'm not sure where she is coming from, but when she is that sure about something, she is correct 99.99 percent of the time.

I also don't think, like writers from the Advocate and the Observer seem to think, that this assessment from the Corps of Engineers kills the road. This just says there are problems with the levees along the Trinity that need to be rectified. This, to me, is more like someone who wants to repaint his frame house but then discovers there's some rotten wood in parts that needs to be replaced. So, before he repaints his house, he needs to replace the rotting wood. The Corps this time around is simply telling the city to replace the rotting wood in its levees before doing anything else. But the Corps didn't tell the City -- at least, not yet -- it can't repaint its house.

I do, however, emphatically agree that the soundness of our levees is more important than any other part of the Trinity River Corridor Project -- any part, including the toll road, the bird sanctuary, the soccer fields, the fake lakes, the Calatrava bridges, anything. In my wildest imagination, I can't foresee a Katrina-like catastrophe happening here, but, then, I'll bet many people in New Orleans never foresaw it happening there either. Bringing the levees up to standard must be Priority No. 1 for the Trinity River Corridor Project and I would hope the City Council would refuse to approve any other parts of the project until the levee problem is fixed to the Corps' satisfaction.

Oops there goes another yellow tree plant

The Dallas City Council's Trinity River Corridor Project Committee is expected to hear a briefing today on proposals for Project's Web site and the third bullet of Slide 3 really caught my attention. It says: "Increase the awareness of the web site through the new design and new features such as online contests." I gotta tell ya, after the way these guys ran the "Let's come up with a new name for Industrial Boulevard" poll, these are the last folks in the world I would trust sponsoring a contest. History argues you absolutely, positively know any contest will be rigged.

Industrial Blvd. needs to be renamed after Carsar Chavez revisited

I am glad someone else is going on record about this, and for reasons, eloquently expressed, that I neglected to mention.

Will Midwest flooding crest in Dallas?

According to this story in today's New York Times, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was known as the city that would never flood. Today, it is under 12 feet of water and, with more thunderstorms on the way, the worst could still be yet to come.

To give you some idea how secure the city fathers of Cedar Rapids felt about their safety, they constructed the City Hall, the county courthouse and the county jail on an island in the river. News photos reveal how completely inaccessible those buildings are today.

All of which reminds me of the Trinity River Corridor Project and the, to me, foolish plan to construct a tollway inside the levees. From what I understand, this idea still hasn't met with the approval of federal officials and I'm wondering whether the flooding in Cedar Rapids could have some influence on the feds' decision.

Industrial Blvd. needs to be renamed after Cesar Chavez

I have three good reasons why Industrial Boulevard should be named after Cesar Chavez and all three in one way or another are connected to the recent poll seeking citizen input on what the new name should be.

First, I voted for Cesar Chavez in the poll. I voted for it for a number of reasons but mainly because it was the best option of the six that were listed. Riverfront Boulevard, which will probably be the choice of the lackeys on the Dallas City Council, is a joke. It suggests that the Trinity is actually a river. It isn't. It's a stream or a creek, but it is definitely not a river. To qualify as a river, the body of flowing water in question must be one that someone would have to be in reasonably good shape to be able to swim across. You should not be able to walk across it, or hop over it, like you can the Trinity. It also suggests that the newly named road runs alongside this stream. It doesn't. The proposed tollway will run alongside it, but this road won't; that is, unless they are going to change the location of the current Industrial Boulevard. Trinity Lakes, another option, is just as laughable because it suggests those artificial ponds that will be placed out there are actually lakes. In order for a man-made body of water to qualify as a lake, there has to be a dam somewhere in the equation. The same holds true with such misnomers as Trinityview and Waterfront boulevards. All these make as much sense as renaming the McCommas Bluff Landfill something like Rose Garden Landfill.

The second reason Industrial should be named after Cesar Chavez is because it was the clear choice of those who participated in the poll. Now, the City Council, stunned at the results of the voting, are already backtracking and coming up with excuses to thwart the will of the people. But in any election in which there are six options and one of them gets over 50 percent of the vote, that's pretty clearcut to me. I will make this prediction: The city of Dallas will never have a primary election with six candidates running for mayor (assuming all six are two-legged) and have one of them pull 52 percent of the vote.

But the third and final reason is because of the comments posted to this item about the poll on the Dallas Morning News' City Hall blog. I recently had a heated discussion with my son on the subject of racism in Dallas. I maintained it was rampant and when you got to the heart of most major policy decisions made in this city, race would be the ultimate deciding factor. I am still stunned by the fact that it wasn't that long ago that Cinemark was prohibited from locating what would have been then its first movie theater in Dallas because of racial animosity (but I was also somewhat gratified that Cinemark sued the City of Dallas over this and won a huge settlement.) All one has to do is read the comments that were posted to this blog entry to realize that blatant racism is alive and well here in Dallas, Texas. Admittedly, I did not read all the comments because the first 50 or so made me so sick to my stomach I couldn't continue.

I always thought the term "ignorant racist" was inherently redundant until I read these comments. Most of them have absolutely no idea who Cesar Chavez was. Far too many of these commenters (none of whom have the courage to use their real names) didn't even know Chavez was an American, born and raised in Arizona. Too many of them wondered why we would honor someone with no connections to Texas without realizing his direct impact on the fruit workers of Starr County in the mid-'60s. I'd bet all of these idiots would be shocked to learn that the Labor Day Holiday in Dallas is officially designated as Labor Day/Cesar Chavez Day, that the state of Texas officially recognizes his birthday on March 31, that there is a statue of him on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin and that in 2003 the United States Postal Service honored him with a postage stamp.

Of course these same jerks compound their ignorant status by arguing the city should select a name that isn't even one of the options and, in the ultimate admittance of their ignorance, many of them proclaimed "I didn't even know there was a poll going on."

So a large part of me simply wants to stick it to these lamebrains and renaming Industrial Cesar Chavez Boulevard would do just that. But I have more honorable reasons as well. It seems to be the will of the people of Dallas and it's the least we can do to honor a true American hero.

Of course, do I expect our Dallas City Council to have the courage to do the right thing? It's more likely they will come across like Big Brown at Belmont.

UPDATE: The City Council committee was even more cowardly than I thought it would be, voting to delay making a decision until the first week in August when any actions will be obscured by the city manager's budget recommendations. That's when the council, in a hallucinatory state unseen since the heyday of Timothy Leary will recommend changing the name to Riverfront Boulevard. Give me a break!

And then there were six

Why is it that the current members of the Dallas City Council can't make a decision? Today the Trinity River Corridor Committee of the Council, led by Chief Wimp David Neumann, was supposed to narrow the list of 10 recommended new names for Industrial Boulevard to three. You could spot the indecisiveness rising immediately when someone on the committee objected to just three names and instead moved it be expanded to four. That, of course, was approved. Heaven forbid, these folks should exert some leadership, for heavens sake.

So they placed all 10 names across the top of a white board and asked each council member to write their names on three sticky notes and affix them under the names they preferred. When that exercise was finished, two names led in the voting and four others tied for third with four votes each.

Now why he didn't ask them to rank their votes is beyond me. But that would have required some thinking and decision-making on the part of the council members and we shouldn't be forcing them to take actions like that, should we?

So Neumann now asked each member of the committee to vote for two names from the four that were tied. What happened? All four tied again. But instead of asking the committee members to vote again, but this time for just one of the four -- in other words forcing them to actually make a decision -- he wimped out and said, lets submit all six names.

The six are Cesar Chavez Boulevard (which was favored by most of the citizens who came to speak before the committee wasted everyone's time with their non-vote), Eddie Bernice Johnson Boulevard, Riverfront Boulevard, Trinity Lakes Boulevard, Trinityview Boulevard and Waterfront Boulevard.

I have already expressed my opinions on the proposed names so I won't go into all that again, but I must admit I am disappointed (although not totally surprised) by the non-actions of this council committee today. What happens now is anyone's guess. Supposedly the public -- that's you and me -- will have a chance to express our opinions by a yet-to-be-announced polling system. How that will work and, more importantly, how "ballot stuffing" will be prohibited, has not been revealed. I can predict right now that none of the six will receive a majority of the votes, so what happens then? A runoff? And will those vote really even matter? I already said the majority of the citizens speaking before the vote favored Cesar Chavez, but second was Stevie Ray Vaughan Boulevard and that didn't make the committee's cut. I realize I'm being a little facetious here, but this whole process is becoming just as silly.

The City Council is supposed to make a decision June 25. That ought to be good for a couple of chuckles as well.

News from the Trinity

I always maintained that the Trinity River Project makes for a great jumping off place.