Oklahoma outrage

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…)

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Filed under: Passenger Rail Politics, Passenger Rail Transportatio Policy