There was a typical long, boring, obscure city council briefing yesterday at City Hall yesterday during which I found myself doing make-believe physics problems like, "Do office towers rise out of the soil a tiny amount when all the people leave at night?" Then, all of the sudden, city councilperson Angela Hunt blows out all the stops. It is for moments like these that dull reporters live.
The briefing, before the city council's Trinity River committee, was about some new "minor tweaks" to the Trinity River Plan. Things were plodding along tweakishly until Hunt took the microphone. She said the truth about the "tweaks" is that the park that citizens voted for in 1998 is being gobbled alive by an expressway nobody voted for.
She said the money for the whole thing is totally out of control. And she said the project -- supposedly about flood control in the first place -- is being designed to put the city at greater risk of flooding, not less.
Hunt is scaring the crap out of Trinity plan boosters because she is the only council member, including our mayor, who has dug into the details of the plan and really gets what's going on. If she is able to get her word out -- if neighborhood groups and Rotaries and so on start inviting Angela Hunt to tell her side of the Trinity story -- then I think this whole thing could get turned around. Who knows: We might even be able to save some of the park we voted for. I'm writing about this in my column for next week. --Jim Schutze