More Than Just The State Budget Out Of Balance

Yes, the state budget is out of balance, but what is more out of whack is the way transportation - - read: highway - - projects are considered sacrosanct in discussions involving both parties, both houses of the legislature and the Doyle administration.

A budget repair bill with just a few months to go until the primary and general election: could there be a more propitious time for the highway lobby to squeeze legislators and protect their contracts?

Yet the $1.9 billion rebuilding and expansion of I-94 from Milwaukee to Illinois is to begin later this year - - perhaps with symbolic shovels in the ground timed for campaign literature printing this summer - - despite documentation that shows the plan's 76 miles of new lanes, at a cost of at least $200 million, will solve only phantom congestion.

Many more millions could be saved with more repaving and fewer bells-and-whistles, but the highway lobby wants none of it, and no cuts anywhere, meaning there will be plenty of other programs taking hits and taxpayer-paid borrowings to fill in some holes.

It is you/we taxpayers that are going to get the shaft when this budget repair deal is announced - - and don't be surprised if the same cast of characters is right back at it in 2009, making fresh cuts, borrowing more money, but protecting the highway lobby and forging ahead with the eight-year I-94 project 'modernization' to Illinois.

And the Zoo Interchange segment of the so-called regional freeway plan that got fast-tracked and green-lighted without a financing plan, too.