JOHN PERKINS
Still seated around the end of government boardroom table between meetings were Mayors Pink and Red along with Administrator Green (not their real names). The chat turned to recollection of a town hall meeting the night before and the grumpy state senator who couldn’t understand why the project to repaint the Jimmie Davis Bridge couldn’t proceed. Remember when we voted on a color we would like – purple -- and then they announced that they couldn’t repaint because of environmental law? There are a lot of laws about transportation projects.
State Senator Grumpas had steam coming out of his ears the night before, they said, chuckling. I got my notes as the talk turned to reality about infrastructure funding and our growing inventory of aging infrastructure that we can’t afford to keep up. Bad decisions from decades ago spoiled us on costly infrastructure conveniences. We were “A City on the Grow” back in the 1960s, but then we built the Jimmie Davis Bridge across the Red River in South Bossier/Shreveport, and we built the I-20 ICC across the Red south of downtown. Crossing the Red became convenient, but we built more infrastructure than we could afford to keep up. Building infrastructure is exciting; paying for the upkeep is impossible without raising taxes because of inflation.
Louisiana has a $14 billion backlog in infrastructure rehab projects. We have another $14 billion in unfunded mega projects waiting for money that hasn’t been printed yet. At the time of that meeting in between meetings, local leaders were worried about missing out on federal transportation funds from the Obama administration that could fund the restoration of the existing JBD while converting it into a bike/ped bridge.
It is true, the Jimmie Davis Bridge was “shovel ready” for February of 2020. No one in the meeting room remembered when that old bridge’s underwater foundations had been checked. It was time to get going. But a few weeks later, the grumpy state senator talked his colleagues into moving the $100 million away from the JDB to the I-49 ICC project currently being studied. The Jimmie Davis was no longer “shovel ready.”
Today, the bridge still isn’t “shovel ready.” Confused? You should know by now that government meetings are so confusing that even the government doesn’t know what it is doing. It seems that the current plan for the new JDB is waiting on new studies to be completed for the proposed new four-lane bridge to be built. One hitch is that there is no longer money available for converting the old JDB into a ped/bike bridge. It will take millions, of course, and it still needs paint. We don’t have any money lying around in a vault to do that work, so it will require finding private funds to get the old bridge in shape. But we know why there are no leftover millions to repair the old bridge, don’t we? We’re spending $17 million on building one interstate service road to nowhere “to show Texas that we mean business about I-69 through Louisiana.”
THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE June 4 ISSUE OF FOCUS SB - THE INQUISITOR.