01 OC Trinity overlook_opt

My column in the March Advocate talks about how we’re going to be writing about city election issues leading up to the May council vote even though most of you simply don’t care. The main reason most of us don’t care much about city politics, in my opinion, is that we figure the people we keep sending Downtown don’t really care much about what we think.

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Well, as it relates to the Trinity Tollroad, it looks like we finally can make a difference. (Full disclosure: I am a longtime “hater” on the Tollroad.)

The Morning News reports that the North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA) board chairman says if the Dallas city council doesn’t want the tollway, the board will probably kill it.

All along, the tollroad has been pitched to us as a regional transportation project; as a by-product, the city would be the beneficiary of what turned out to be a bunch of imaginary lakes and parkland. And for years, city attorneys have told us that we can’t get out of our commitment to build the tollroad because of a binding legal commitment to the NTTA the city signed in 1999.

So if the NTTA is lukewarm on the idea, and the city is lukewarm on the idea, all we have to do to finally kill this project once and for all is elect enough council members in May who agree the tollroad is a big waste of a billion or so of our tax dollars.

Think about that during the election season. If a billion dollars of our money doesn’t get your attention, what will?