Stimulus Stimulating Sprawl: Controls, Vigilance Required
Texas wants to spend big stimulus dollars on a new sprawl-serving toll road: Big surprise. Texas has giant toll road plans on the books, so stimulus funding offers a cheaper way to get them built.
So far, Wisconsin's transportation stimuls planning is a mixed bag. $97 million went out the door early to push along the I-94 north/south leg expansion and rebuilding from Milwaukee to Illinois, but Gov. Doyle is also pledging a major effort to launch high-speed rail in the state.
So far, no toll roads.
But I have yet to see any evidence that stimulus transportation spending in SE Wisconsin, where the state's low-income residents are concentrated, is targeted to aid low-income employment or transportation needs - - purportedly a stimulus priority.
We also have to make sure SEWEPC does not direct stimulus funds it controls to the Pabst Farms mall 'interchange to nowhere,' or other sprawl-serving road expansions in Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington Counties.
The ACLU of Wisconsin has raised some of these issues.
More later.
3 comments:
The Pabst Farms interchange is in the Transportation Improvement Plan that SEWRPC just finished accepting comments on.
I know. We need to organize and block it, and to make sure that stimulus funds aren't used at the state level to end-run things, or backfill a state appropriation needing approval in Madison.
I was out by Pabst Farms a couple weeks ago and it looked a lot like Northridge- lots of abandoned buildings, concrete, parking lots with weeds growing up in them...weird. Sprawl starts to look like ghetto pretty quickly. Northridge was farmland not that long ago, either.
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