Thursday, September 4, 2008

The Road To Sprawlville, Chapter XX: Waukesha County's 'Obscene' Grab For State Road Dollars

Sometimes people have no shame, so steeped are they in self-centered denial that their public policies and statements degrade into embarrassing self-parody.

This is the subject of the 20th installment of this blog's occasional series, "The Road To Sprawlville" - - often bumpy, sometimes chaotic or unhappy, and definitely expensive.

In this chapter, we discover that Waukesha County officials, where tax-and-spend is allegedly a political crime, are now stuck in some hypocritical, and self-delivered quicksand.

Let them dig themselves out.

Here is the situation: There is a move to get the long-stalled Waukesha west bypass started and financed.

It's a local road extension to remove local congestion from sprawling western Waukesha - - but the county is balking at the state's generous offer to get the plan finished.

The state has offered to pay - - with your money and more - - 50% of the estimated $50 million tab, or $25 million.

Waukesha County wants the taxpayers of the state and the rest of region to pay a lot more, reports the Journal Sentinel, as the county's final offer is $10 million, or $20% of the total.

A Waukesha County official calls the state's offer "obscene."

You want obscene?

Remember that the state agreed quickly, and in cahoots with Waukesha County, to pick up $23.1 million of the estimated $25 million cost for the I-94 interchange to the Pabst Farm Not-Yet-Built Mall, with Waukesha County only paying 7%, or $1.75 million.

Portions of that interchange planning and decision-making have led to a federal civil rights complaint.

Does Waukesha think it should receive its highway project funding with most of the cost paid by others? Does Waukesha expect that 7% is the norm, and 20% is the max?

What other municipality feels similarly entitled, and would have the gall or lack of awareness to trumpet it?

Also - - Waukesha County has refused to join the Regional Transportation Authority because it fears tax dollars would go to help Milwaukee transit services.

But keep on sending your money out to Waukesha County for frivolous interchanges and highly-subsidized local projects.

Gimme, gimme, gimme.

What chutzpah!.

State transportation dollars come out of a common pot of money collected from motorists in gas tax and licensing revenues.

Road projects come with cost-sharing formulaes.

As I pointed out here - - the state gave the County a break on the I-94 interchange. It could have assigned them a larger share, and in hindsight, should have done just that.

The state's permissiveness and favoritism is coming back unappreciated from an ungrateful County now enabled and emboldened to look for bigger handouts and gaudier state subsidies.

And these payments are supposed to be poured right into the heart of Sprawlville, where development has been encouraged to run amok, but where there has been virtually no transit expansion - - meaning that without a paradigm shift in priorities, western Waukesha will be demanding more millions for more lanes in a few years.

The state should hold its ground.

A 50% state contribution was already enough, maybe too much, and if Waukesha continues to be greedy and whiny and demanding, the state should take that 50% off the table and tell the locals to fix the congestion that is solely their own creation with their own property tax dollars.

Then maybe there'd be some economies and land-use management added to what passes for transportation planning in Sprawlville.

4 comments:

  1. Look ahead for a possible compromise. The compromise might drop the Waukesha share to 35%, maybe 30% for the by-pass.

    DOT will--with this sweetened "offer"--recognize the looming collapse of the laughable Pabst Farms dream scenario. They will back away from the Sawyer Road interchange on grounds that the residential development is never going to happen on phase two and three of PF. Plus, they have seen nothing, nada, zero, zip from the regional mall developers, whose hallucinated needs to accommodate thousands of shoppers seemed to give a rationale to the interchange plan.

    You gotta believe that there is balking on DOT construction at Pabst Farms coming from both Oconomowoc and Vrakas's office at the County. They probably don't want to pony up even the piddling amounts they agreed to for the interchange, given the way the PF development is going into the tank.

    Waukesha had a "bread and circuses" moment last week with the Harley Davidson bacchanal in the City of Waukesha. It has re-energized those who dream of ever-expanding suburban sprawl west of the City of Waukesha.

    But, this hard-line demand for 50% for the bypass from Busalachi at DOT is an early warning to Waukesha that the sprawl party's over.

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  2. Intersting analysis, Jim. Thanks for sending it.

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  3. What does this mean?

    "Waukesha had a 'bread and circuses' moment . . . " ?

    Regarding the Waukesha West bypass. It will bypass nothing. More stoplights, complicated (and expensive) intersections and widened everything will destroy neighborhoods and farmlands, cut down hundreds of years-old trees, create higher traffic speeds--and thus accidents, ruin the the rural nature of the area, increase noise, air and light pollution, but most importantly of all: it will open up new lands for uninspired commercial development, which means more of what we already have in plenty: strip malls, big boring boxes, and cookie cutter chain stores. Do we really need another Walgreens every 2 miles?

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  4. Betsey: Bread & Circuses. I think it's a pretty apt analogy for this.

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