Surprise, Surprise: Highway Boondoggle Has Unanticipated Local Costs

When Tax-and-Spend Tommy Thompson was Governor, his transportation planners ordered up a highway-lobby lovin' plan to widen most highways around the state, which is one reason the state highway budget is still about $5 billion short of identified funds.

One key element in his spending spree, embraced by irresponsible legislators who saw it as a way to bring home some bacon paid for by everyone else, was schedule bypasses of many small communities.

In 2005, I wrote a Capital Times column about this bypass binge, noting that there was even a community of 355 people - - Pound, in Marinette County - - on the list of cities, towns and villages targeted for a four-lane bypass.

Want to see what these over-engineered monstrosities looks like? Here's what now bypasses little Mineral Point - - that noted highway congestion nightmare that needed somewhere around $70 million of tax dollars to get 'improved.'

Aside from damaging downtowns, the bypasses eat up farmland and leave locals with new headaches, like more patrolling and maintenance costs.

And accident clean-up, too.

This is what officials in Burlington are now discovering - - this town of about 10,000 people, which has costly and troubling new responsibilities attributable to their new $100 million bypass.

Yes, you read that right. A $100 million gob of public funds - - translated into concrete and recurring costs.

Created by the same folks who are busy doling out $6.5 billion on the modernization (sic) of the so-called 'freeway' (not so free!) system in southeastern Wisconsin, but in which there is not an allocated dime for any transit.

Keep the Burlington bypass in mind when you read that there is no state transportation financing for, say, a Milwaukee-to-Madison train link, or commuter trains from from Milwaukee-to-Racine-to-Kenosha, or even a paltry $100,000 to keep a bus line running to bring low-income workers from Milwaukee to their Waukesha County jobs.

Once set in motion, highway planning is very hard to detour or shift to transit, or to pare back on behalf of over-taxed motorists and residents.

Highway overspending has been a bi-partisan scandal in Wisconsin, regardless of the party in power.

But let's not forget that Tommy Thompson, governor from 1986-2001, is the politician who put the state onto the Road to Red Ink and who cemented the highway lobby's power as a permanent overlay onto the ever-burgeoning state transportation, bonding and vehicle operating fee obligations.