The proposed Trinity Toll Road
A funeral for the Trinity Toll Road is planned for Sunday and former City Councilwoman Angela Hunt is one of the pallbearers.
The obituary lists former Mayor Tom Leppert as the road’s closest survivor and asks mourners to please send $1.5 billion for actual improvements for the city in lieu of flowers.
For her first few years on the council, Hunt was the only council member to call the plan to pave the Trinity River stupid. OK, so she actually used stronger language than that and Leppert refused to talk to her for four years.
And they actually weren’t going to pave the river. They were going to build a parkway in the river bottoms that flood severely once or twice every decade.
Then when costs began to soar, they turned the “parkway” into a “tollroad.”
When everyone questioned whether the road was going to flood, they decided to put the toll road on an elevated levee. Except no one would answer Hunt’s question: How do you put a road on an elevated levee and make it go under the Angela Hunt Hill Bridge and over the other historic bridges crossing the river? And if the river already floods to the top of the levees, won’t they flood over the top when part of the river bottom displaces the flood area? Where will the water go?
When the levee idea became too ridiculous to actually consider, they decided to put up a wall between the river and the levee and put the road in a trench. No one answered what happens if there’s ever a crack in the wall and the water comes pouring through during a flood. We all know the answer, though. Put a finger in the dyke. Yeah, that’ll work.
When Scott Griggs joined the council, he shared Hunt’s opinion that the tollroad-in-the-river was a hare-brained scheme.
Councilman Philip Kingston, who replaced Hunt on the Council, shared his predecessor’s opinion of the road. Councilman Adam Medrano also isn’t in favor of throwing out billions of dollars and others have joined the opposition.
That leaves the mayor and his biggest ally on the council — Vonceil Jones Hill — as the biggest remaining cheerleaders for this stupid plan.
The funeral for the toll road takes place in Bishop Arts on Sunday at 5 p.m. The procession begins at Oddfellows, where they’ll be serving a special drink called a Flooded Parkway.
