Sunday, October 21, 2007

Speak Up About The Pabst Farms Interchange Boondoggle

So you think it's crazy that the state wants to spend more than $20 million of your tax dollars to build an interstate highway interchange to service the cancelled Pabst Farms shopping mall?

(Background here.)

You think the state needs to focus transportation spending on transit improvements?

You want state and local planners to stop accelerating sprawl and inducing more traffic in Waukesha County?

You know that ripping up the landscape to build roads to nowhere, without an authentic environmental impact statement, should be blocked before a bulldozer is allowed to scoop up a single cubic yard of what remains of prime Waukesha County agricultural lands?

Then do something: get your comments into the interchange review process, through a comment link, here, before October 29th.

Get your friends to participate. Send them the link. Call your alderman and county board supervisor and state legislator and urge them to do the same.

We don't have to settle for the status quo, allowing state transportation planners and local politicos to decide behind closed doors that highway expansion schedules and public budgets can be altered for a special interest on whims and spin and the thinnest of motives.

Maybe this is the tipping point, the moment at which people decided enough was enough, that we want genuine planning and democratic decision-making and have to approach these issues with real urgency and intention.

Or we will look back and say it was an opportunity missed.

3 comments:

Dave said...

Thanks for the link, I sent them an email

Anonymous said...

I sent a comment as well. Thanks for all you do to inform us about these back room decisions to squander public money on projects that harm the biosphere.

James Rowen said...

You are welcome. Also: The Waukesha County Board of Supervisors takes up its $1.75 million portion of the interchange that was pledged by County Exec. Varakas. Good time for folks to show up and say "No Way!"