Trinity toll road foes say 80,000 signed petition for November vote

By BRUCE TOMASO - The Dallas Morning News - June 29, 2007
Dallas voters will decide in November whether to scrap the Trinity River toll road, if referendum petitions submitted Friday by opponents of the road are certified as valid.

City Council member Angela Hunt said her group, TrinityVote, had gathered more than 80,000 signatures to stop the toll road, a key component of the Trinity River Corridor Project. If 48,000 of those signatures are certified by the city secretary as valid and belonging to registered voters living in Dallas, a measure will be placed on the November ballot.

That measure would prohibit the construction of any road inside the river levees that is more than four lanes wide, with a speed limit of more than 35 mph.

“Here you see before you a mandate from 80,000 people in Dallas who say they want a voice in the future of our Trinity River,” Ms. Hunt said at a City Hall news conference. Behind her stood more than 50 volunteers from TrinityVote, many of them wearing T-shirts that said, “Park or toll road? Let the voters decide.”

Striking a populist chord, Ms. Hunt alluded to the fact that the toll road is supported by many members of the city’s civic, business and political elite.


“There are some politicians who want to pave the Trinity,” she said. “But that option is no longer in their hands. As of today, the decision is in our hands, the hands of the voters, where it rightfully belongs.”

Ms. Hunt contends that the toll road should be scrapped because it will detract from the proposed downtown river park that many perceive as the centerpiece of the Trinity Project. She said that when Dallas voters approved $246 million in bonds for the Trinity project in 1998, many thought they were voting for a low-speed parkway, not a high-speed, multi-lane toll road.

Supporters of the road say it's needed to alleviate downtown congestion, and that removing it now from the plans could delay work on other aspects of the Trinity project, including the park and flood-control improvements

Angela Hunt Proves It: The Mayor's Been Lying About the Trinity River Toll Road

By Jim Schutze - The Dallas Observer - May 01, 2007

Angela Hunt has just blown the center right out of Laura Miller's defense of the Trinity River toll road, and she has done it with a bit of investigative reporting that should have our tree-climbing ex-reporter mayor tied in little green Boy Scout knots.

Miller has been defending her plan for a big fat expressway through the park we're trying to build on the Trinity River downtown by saying the idea was OK'd, blessed and signed off on by the expert she brought down here a couple years ago from Harvard, Alex Krieger. Now, by filing open records demands for Miller's e-mails, Hunt has found the smoking gun: On the Trinity Vote Web site this morning is an e-mail from Krieger to Miller telling her he is dismayed that the city intends to build "a great big interstate highway instead of a parkway" along the Trinity.

Miller's other expert, transportation planner Bill Eager, also weighs in with an e-mail agreeing with Krieger.

What Hunt has uncovered here is an enormous public deception on Miller's part. In appearance after appearance, statement after statement, Miller has insisted that Hunt doesn't know what she's talking about. Miller keeps saying the current design for the toll road is what everybody agreed on and the Harvard guy designed.

Now we learn that Krieger wrote Miller a month ago telling her the road had bloated into something he didn't recognize. Here is the full text of Krieger's e-mail:


From Alex Krieger
March 22, 2007
to Bill Eager, Laura

Laura,

I'm not sure in what context the issue of alternative alignments for the Trinity Parkway has come up, but during my recent visit -- at the initial charette with the Trinity Lakes Planning Team -- what concerned me most was that the engineering of the road was proceeding as if it were a great big interstate highway instead of a parkway and that there was absolutely no evidence of concern for the "context sensitive design" that was promised as part of the balanced vision plan. Devoting MUCH MUCH more attention to the design of the roadway - and making sure that it results in a road worthy of being part of great park and open space environment -- is what I think is most immediately necessary.

Best,
Alex Krieger

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Someone’s crying, Laura, kumbaya

Dave Levinthal of the Dallas Morning News reports on a call for harmony during the tense dramatic Dallas 2007 city elections. Opposition to the Trinity Toll Road is a hot topic in this year's election. His post on the "education technicans" employed by backers of the Trinity River Tollway Project is worth our attention. Angela Hunt's letter to Laura Miller in response to harassment of signature seeking petitioners is included in the article. Levinthal doesn't mention in this article that the supporters of the Trinity Toll Road, (Laura Miller and many corporate sponsors including Baylor Health Care System, University of North Texas, and Mary Kay) have established a non-profit educational foundation to promote the project. Some opponents charge that there are violations to the election code in using governmental and corporate money to hire consultants who are interferring with petitioners collecting signatures in opposition to the Trinity Toll Way. Things are getting interesting in Dallas. There have always been bodies were dumped near the levee of the Trinity. We'll watch to see if any political skeletons emerge from relationships with this project.

Road plan at heart of debate Park project gets broad support, but some want to slam brakes on tollway

08:22 AM CDT on Friday, May 11, 2007
By BRUCE TOMASO / The Dallas Morning News
btomaso@dallasnews.com

In the latest fight over the Trinity River Corridor Project, there's one thing both sides agree on:

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1998. That's when Dallas voters overwhelmingly approved a $246 million bond proposal to transform the river from a ditch to a downtown jewel.

To City Council member Angela Hunt, the changes made to the plan over the years are so radical and disruptive that the current project is no longer what voters approved.

In particular, she's irate that the "Trinity Parkway" – originally a divided highway with four northbound lanes on the downtown side of the river bottoms and four southbound lanes on the Oak Cliff side – has morphed into a high-speed toll road, all on the downtown side, that will whisk motorists past the river park and lakes while providing little or no access to those recreational amenities.

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