SEWRPC Housing Study Chairman Supports Highway Expansion That Could Demolish Homes

When it comes to reporting on the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, a reader could easily assume that SEWRPC fact is surely planner fiction.

Remember the long-delayed, still-delayed (33 years and counting) regional housing plan that SEWRPC says it is just about to begin?

The study launch is so close that the planning agency has said it intends to name Bill Drew, a Milwaukee County SEWRPC commissioner, as the study's chairman.

Must mean that Drew, the former commissioner of development under former Milwaukee Mayor Henry Maier, is a housing advocate, right?

You'd never know it from this Journal Sentinel story, wherein Drew weighs in, as head of the Milwaukee County Research Park, favoring a major widening of the Zoo Interchange that could demolish 30 homes.

The interchange widening is one segment of a $6.5 billion regional freeway plan written by...yes...you guessed it...SEWRPC.

The sheer destruction to homes, businesses, tax base, and open space that state transportation engineers envision in this so-called 'improvement' is jaw-dropping.

But when SEWRPC and WisDOT tag team planning and spending, the result is more pavement, a few minutes of projected commuting time savings for Waukesha County residents, and a lump of coal in everyone else's perpetual stocking.

Any transit improvements in that Zoo Interchange transportation plan?

Stop it: you're killing me.