Public Comments Count? The Record Shows Otherwise

A Wisconsin Department of Transportation spokeswoman tells the Daily Reporter that comments on the Zoo Interchange really matter in the design of the $2.3 billion project.

The spokeswoman is one of two WisDOT officials who called the State Fair coppers to make sure sure some citizen opponents were not allowed to pass out literature at the most recent public meeting on the project held in a building on the State Fairgrounds, according to one of the citizens.

[A bit of history: The citizens who were told by the State Fair police to hand out their leaflets at vehicle entrances blocks from the meeting room first got organized - - and their first taste of the public comment process - - about a decade ago. That's when they urged officials not to allow WisDOT to widen, from two lanes to four, a 13-mile stretch of State Highway 164 in exurban and rural Waukesha and Washington Counties. They presented the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission during its review of the widening plan with 7,000 signatures in opposition. Those petitions were reviewed, but the advice in them was not accepted.]

Two calls I made to WisDOT headquarters about the incident at State Fair Park - - I was directed there by WisDOT's regional office in Waukesha - - were never answered.

I believe the correct term for that variation of comment "review and dismiss" is stonewalling.

Which is about the same thing I'm getting from the Federal Highway Administration.

Emails and a call to its Madison office over the last couple of weeks for information about the status of the quadrennial performance review the agency was/is? conducting of the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission have gone unanswered.

Back in March, after a delay ascribed to the pressures of stimulus funding deadlines, the agency said we could expect the release of the report in May.

My calendar says August is approaching, the comment period ended more than eight months ago on November 10th, and still no inking of the report - - a key piece in a process (sic) that began with both SEWRPC and the feds trying - - and failing - - to turn the review's traditional public hearing into a more informal, tepid, community Kumbaya session of sorts.

Highway engineers and bureaucrats like the way smoothed for letting contracts and laying concrete.

Messy stuff like hearings...public input...and comments from plain ol' citizens to be reviewed, or actually studied, absorbed and implemented?

C'mon.