Buried at the bottom of a story in Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper about the latest plan to rescue the Trinity River toll road were a couple of quotes from an engineer working on the project for the city. Said Tim Abrams, geotechnical department manager for Terracon Consultants Inc.:

"I didn’t fully appreciate this aspect as well as I do now until after I had sat through a lot of these meetings," he said. "But the corps is looking at this from a different perspective: With the levees, you’re designing something for an indefinite period or time. They are looking 50, 75 or more years down the road. So they approach these things with far more conservatism than maybe you need when you are designing a roadway pavement system that has to last 25 or 30 years."

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Son of a gun. Do you mean there is more to the project than just building a highway? Does someone downtown finally realize that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wants to prevent a catastrophic flood — something that the City Hall types have previously brushed off as the Corps not being a team player?