Fort Worth Business Press, May 12, 2014 Vol. 26, No. 18 | Page 35

opinion

fwbusinesspress.com | May 12 - 18, 2014

35

River vision: Money meandering down the drain

T

he Dallas Morning News reported recently that
the Dallas Floodway needs more than half a
billion dollars worth of work – a project that
involves moving the Trinity River to restore the river
to its “historic natural meandering.”
Dallas taxpayers could be on the hook for more
than $185 million of the $529 million project’s total
cost, the newspaper said. Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs called the price tag “a staggering
amount of money.” The federal portion of the money
would come from congressional appropriations, according to the newspaper, which quoted Rob Newman, the Army Corps of Engineers’ director of the
Trinity River Corridor Project: “It’s a huge cost.”
According to a feasibility study released by the
Corps, the News reported, “the Trinity River near
downtown Dallas should be moved – again – in
order to restore an aquatic ecosystem damaged by
the channelization of the 1920s and accommodate
the long-planned six-lane toll road the city wants to
build between the levees.”
Newman explained: “The reason it was straightened was because it was a bypass channel in the ’20s
when you didn’t think about ecosystem restoration.
The Corps back then wasn’t real environmentally
friendly.”
All of this from a now “environmentally friendly”
Corps that would change the course of the Trinity in
Fort Worth from its beautiful, naturally meandering
flow beneath the towering bluffs where Ripley Arnold
built his fort in 1849. All of this from the same Army
Corps of Engineers that is hellbent to cover up the

n Don Woodard

Fort Worth’s original $26.6
million commitment to the
nepotistic Trinity Uptown
boond