This reader response from out in Oklahoma to the item on Ohio’s crackpot governor had to be moved to the front page. Enjoy.
Kasich fits the “asphalt cult” profile to a “tee,” like his brethren in Oklahoma — Inhofe, Coburn, Cole, former governor Frank Keating and his “asphalt Czar” Neal McCaleb. Having already hung their grandchildren with $40 billion in “unfunded highway maintenance requirement,” they quite deliberately relocated a downtown OKC segment of I-40 eight blocks off its historic path, making certain to reroute it right through the historic 8-block-long, 12-track-wide OKC Union Station rail yard, strategic center of the state’s rather unique publicly-owned 866-mile rail network. Project price (3.96 miles of road) has now strangely jumped far beyond the “$236 million” estimate to something well past $800 million (not counting the replacement cost of the passenger-rail yard). Oh — and the local MPO has spent around $400K “studying” a new rail humb for the metro. Trouble is — none of this could have been done without the aggressive cooperation of BNSF Railway Company, which, in its newfound
“post-deregulation monopoly status” has apparently become part of the “asphalt cult,” as well. Ahhh, there’s nothing like a “cult.”
(Notable, as well, that current “state transportation Czar Gary Ridley,” the “P.E. without a dee-gree,” as some of us call him, was brought back to ODOT prior to the departure of Keating Czar Neal McCaleb (for the shortest-and-strangest-in-history-tenure as Bureau of Indian Affairs Director under GW Bush) — from a five-year stint as Executive Director of the Oklahoma Asphalt Paving Association. Ridley has now been preemptively reconfirmed for another term by asphalt-cult puppet and governor-elect Mary Fallin Christensen…)
Filed under: Passenger Rail Politics, Passenger Rail Transportatio Policy
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