"We could have most of what people want for the river, without a lot of the baggage that's been thrown onto it," Gray says.
When the question of the signature bridges came back to the city council for a formal vote last Wednesday, most of the council members revealed by the questions they asked that they had no idea how the project works or why it has been designed the way it has. In response to the only question about whether it will actually protect the city from floods, Assistant City Manager Jordan assured the council the project will provide "several feet of freeboard" on the levees, meaning the new construction will keep floodwaters several feet below the level where they would top the levees and spill into downtown.
The new plan for the Trinity River is a far cry from the original images of a lake covered with sailboats and a park filled with picnickers, but the bridges would be snazzy. According to this designer’s view looking northeast toward downtown, the new Trinity would be split into two narrow channels (1) of polluted water flowing parallel to a narrow, shallow lake (2) filled with water pumped from a treatment plant, the ground, and cleaner surface water sources. The public could enjoy the vista, and presumably the smell, from concrete platforms (3) intended as gathering places. The sights they would take in would include eight lanes of tollways (4)<\m>four on each side of the river<\m>and, if the city council and engineers get their way, seven impressive new suspension bridges like this butterfly design for Interstate 30 (5) by famed bridge architect Santiago Calatrava. Narrow pathways between the lake and the sewage canals are all that would be left of what was once billed as Dallas’ “Central Park” (6), though the designers envision the project spurring residential and commercial development along the river’s levees (7).
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Not true.
It might be true if there were no toll road inside the levees. But with the toll road there, even the Halff people concede that this flood-control project -- at a total cost of more than $1 billion in city, state, and federal tax dollars -- will provide only "an average of one foot" of freeboard along its length, meaning less than a foot of freeboard in some key areas. Pretty tight for a billion dollars.
Only North Dallas council member Donna Blumer voted against the signature bridges. Citing the city's $3 billion-plus backlog of basic maintenance, Blumer ticked off other glitzy big-ticket items to which the council has obligated Dallas taxpayers, including the new sports arena and the 2012 Olympics.
Blumer said she was afraid that signing up the city to pay for hundreds of millions more for pretty bridges is a way of "hamstringing future councils" so that the city will have no borrowing capacity left when it finally gets around to fixing the streets and sewers.
Given what has transpired so far, the opponents' chances of getting the rest of the city council to focus on these issues seem slim indeed. Mary Vogelson, a member of the League of Women Voters and past president of Save Open Spaces, says, "I really don't see at this point how we can accomplish anything except in court."
The promoters of the river plan understand one thing well: The way to make the city council stop worrying about something complex and difficult is to show it something shiny instead.
In this case, seven shiny new suspension bridges.
