A standing-room-only crowd of more than 500 people packed the auditorium at Rosemont Elementary in Oak Cliff yesterday evening for what was perhaps the most honest, open debate about the Trinity Toll Road ever to take place in this city.
The event, organized by State Representative Rafael Anchia, pitted the most outspoken representatives of the pro- and anti-toll road debate in a town hall-style discussion about the controversial plans to build a high-speed traffic artery through the Trinity River floodway. The crowd was overwhelmingly against the road and at times cheered for comments made by anti-road flag wavers Scott Griggs, Patrick Kennedy, and Bob Meckfessel and laughed –- and at one point hissed –- at remarks made by North Central Texas Council of Government transportation director Michael Morris. But the event was largely well-mannered, thanks in part to able moderating by the state rep, who reminded everyone at the outset that they were sitting in an elementary school.
“If we were parents, and children were acting up, we would frown on it,” Anchia said.
The situation was palpably tense for the pro-road contingent, which also included former city manager Mary Suhm and former city council member and Trinity Commons Foundation executive director Craig Holcomb. In moving remarks made at the conclusion of the debate, Holcomb acknowledged the difficulty of representing his side of the debate in the forum and spoke about his own political upbringing in the grass-roots battlegrounds of East Dallas.
“If you think that I looked forward to being here tonight, you would be wrong,” Holcomb said in a shaky voice and moment of sincerity that drew respectful applause from the crowd. “But I have a deep commitment to an open discourse. I will try my best not to change your mind, but to let you know the facts as I know them.”
There was a sense by the end of the debate that we had a firmer grasp, if not on the facts, then on just why there is so much confusion surrounding many of the facts in the debate. That clarity was achieved was a testament to Anchia’s moderating. In fact, if there was a star in this event, it was Anchia. Gracious, funny, fair, logical, and clear, he took questions submitted via email and index cards and laid the most pressing issues on the table, making the two sides address confusions and contradictions in an open and candid manner that was both respectful and effective.
Perhaps Anchia’s finest moment, however, came when he dressed-down Michael Morris in a quippy exchange over his online survey, which prompted the town hall. Anchia admitted that his survey was unscientific and likely skewed toward an anti-road response, but added that he has since hired an outside national polling firm to conduct a more scientific survey of his constituents. The results weren’t as one-sided, he said, but residents still oppose the road overwhelming by about two to one. When Morris rebutted that he had been doing some of his own number crunching, looking at how results from the 2007 toll road referendum broke down in Anchia’s district, the representative seemed nonplussed.
“That was in 2007?” Anchia asked. “Yeah. I appreciate you doing that work. You should get an advance. That’s good stuff.”
Anchia’s tension-splitting sarcasm popped up on a number of occasions, as when he spatted with council member Vonciel Jones Hill, who shouted out from the audience at one point, and when he teased the many elected officials and candidates in the audience. But mostly he helped make sure the panelists directly addressed each contentious issue. There was a lot of ground covered: funding, design, traffic capacity, southern sector development, theories of urban design, density, the Oak Cliff Gateway zoning, the Southern Gateway highway project, regionalism, city building, job exportation, the importance of city cores to regional growth, the foreboding example of Detroit’s highway-driven disinvestment, the positive example of Chattanooga, which turned a highway along its riverfront into a boulevard and eventually a two-lane road — and on and on and on for two and a half hours.
But the comment that rang loudest and clearest throughout the debate came from an impassioned Griggs: “This is a road looking for a purpose,” he said.
When all was said and done, the purpose of the road, as put forth by the toll road backers, appears to rest on two fundamental points:
- The Balanced Vision Plan is the agreed-upon policy document guiding what should happen in the Trinity River floodway (“Our side has a consensus position,” Morris said.)
- The toll road is being built to promote economic equality in the Southern Sector
Griggs was quick to remind the audience that one problem with this position is that these aren’t really the most fundamental justifications for the toll road. Rather, they’re just the last justifications left standing after decades of contentious debate and contextual evolutions. Over the years, Griggs said, backers said we needed to build the toll road because it was necessary for the completion of the “horseshoe” highway interchange, Project Pegasus, and the SM Wright highway refurbishments; that the funding of the recreational amenities were tied to the building of the road; that the road was the key for economic development in the southern sector; that it would solve traffic congestion in the Mixmaster. None of these justifications hold water, he argued. Regarding Southern Sector development, Griggs pointed to developments and revitalization in West Dallas and North Oak Cliff to prove that roads don’t create the kind of economic activity that is transforming these neighborhoods. Regarding congestion, Griggs pointed to a recent study that shows that the Trinity toll road would only improve travel speed in the Stemmons Corridor by 2 mph.
Morris contested the report about the travel speed, saying it didn’t sufficiently account for “system benefit.” Otherwise, the pro-road contingent, whose arguments were primarily voiced by Morris, focused on the road as a tool of economic development. The Balanced Vision Plan is “our DFW Airport opportunity,” a line which drew laughter and some heckles from the crowd.
As I’ve written before, much of the disagreement over this road boils down to ideological disagreements about the nature of urban planning and city building. The words “economic development” were thrown around a lot last night, but what was clear during the discussion is that it is an ambiguous term that means many different things to many different people. “Do roads create economic development?” Anchia pointedly asked. Morris said yes, and pointed to a Nebraska Furniture warehouse that has recently opened next to a toll road in Collin County. Griggs, on the other hand, pointed to the proposed five-story interchange that is being planned to connect I-35 to the Trinity Toll Road and would effectively trample efforts to redevelop the Oak Farms Dairy and Burnett Field sites in North Oak Cliff. Roads create a kind of economic development, he said, and it’s not the economic development that is good for the development of the center core or the southern sector.
The other ideological fissure relates to the perceived impact the Trinity toll road would have in the southern sector. Morris called the road a way of connecting the “disconnected islands created by the transportation system.” Traffic congestion places an undue burden on those who have to travel long distances to get to work, he said, and we need to expand capacity to reduce those travel times. The anti-toll road contingent argued that building roads is not the way to solve this economic inequality. Rather, transportation policy should promote job creation in the central core. Kennedy said that what the Stemmons Corridor needs is not increased highway access but more workforce housing. “There are 117,000 jobs in the Stemmons Corridor and only 13,000 residents,” he said. Griggs said that the real watershed for the Southern Sector will come when the first office building “jumps” the Trinity River, and he believes that could happen in the Oak Cliff Gateway — as long as the five-story interchange isn’t there.
Resistance to these ideas, however, revolve around the nature and pace of change. Morris dismissed promises of urban infill in the southern sector as “waving a magic wand.” He expressed doubt over the idea that we can simply ask those in the southern sector to wait for the promise of an urbanized future while not addressing the hardship of their day-to-day experience. The resistance to a more aggressive transportation policy that seeks to reverse the road building, sprawl-inducing strategies birthed in mid-20th century boils down to a reluctance to accept the short-term burdens on the most economically challenged citizens of our city for the promise of a future revitalization of the economic vibrancy of the city core. But what pro-road backers can’t seem to grasp is the inherent contradiction in their moral argument. Regardless of the promise of shortened commute times, building the toll road isn’t serving the southern sector because it is perpetuating the economic conditions that created the blight in the southern sector in the first place.
Then there are factual disagreements. Morris’ dismissal of the study that projects the toll road’s very limited congestion relief was one of them. Suhm and Holcomb repeatedly assured the audience that the engineering plans submitted for federal environmental review by the NTTA represent the most impactful vision of the road, but that what will be built will be the road laid out in the Balanced Vision Plan. In other words, the road will not be as large as the one represented in the plans. But Griggs countered that much of the engineering of the road, including the flood wall, the orientation of the road, and the size of the platform upon which the road will rest, will be built according to the maximum capacity reflected in the plans to allow for future scaling-up of the road. Suhm’s expert design team will only be able to discuss “putting lipstick on the pig,” he said.
All that said, regardless of the validity of the Balanced Vision Plan and philosophies of urban planning, hope for connecting people to jobs, reasons to respect the past or admit to change — the huge looming issue that continues to hang over the toll road is perhaps the most simple and most straightforward: there is no funding.
Anchia asked Morris to lay out the funding plan as it stands today. The estimated $1 billion road (a figure that has been revised down from earlier projections of $1.5 billion and $1.3 billion) will be funded, Morris said, with $200 million from the Regional Transportation Council and $300 million from the North Texas Tollway Authority. Before pointing to the $500 million funding gap, Anchia was keen to point out that the NTTA has said that they have reached their bonding limit, and the $300 million they are expected to pitch in for the road is in doubt. “Surely you’ve had conversations with them about this,” Anchia pressed Morris, who said he had had those conversations but he didn’t want to talk about them in the public forum. Anchia didn’t let him off so easily and pressed for concrete ideas on plugging the funding gap. Morris admitted that the gap funding would be provided by finding private investors. Morris assured Anchia that there would be private sector appetite for investing in the Trinity toll road.
Let’s leave aside the implicit irony in all of this, that a road that is now justified largely on terms of addressing economic inequality — connecting disenfranchised, poor southern sector residents to the jobs that are continually migrating farther and farther north in the city — will be privately funded and will essentially impose double taxation on these poor residents while simultaneously propping up the economic models that make them car dependent and reliant on longer and longer commutes in order to have access to economic opportunity. Let’s forget that for a second. Let’s instead focus on the question that Griggs raised in response to Morris and Anchia’s back-and-forth on funding.
“Look at the opportunity costs,” Griggs said. “What are our priorities?”
With $1 billion, Griggs speculated, we could put a deck park over the I-30 canyon in downtown Dallas, thus re-connecting the Cedars to the central core. With $1 billion we could fund the trenching of I-30 in East Dallas a la Central Expressway, thus reconnecting the historic South Dallas neighborhoods around Fair Park with the rest of the city. Why is it that a road that is based on such a dwindling set of spurious justifications, that is beleaguered with funding doubts, that is a product of antiquated assumptions about transportation and economic development, that will have a dubious and limited effect on traffic congestion, that will ravage our parkland, further disconnect our downtown from its green space — why is that road still a topic of such heated debate? How is it that those who support this road have become so blind to the opportunity costs, to the fact that their allegiance stems back through time to contexts, circumstances, and justifications that no longer exist?
Perhaps the clearest, most persuasive comments of the evening came from Bob Meckfessel, an architect and former head of the Dallas AIA who has been involved with the Trinity toll road since 1998. He was president of Holcomb’s Trinity Commons Foundation during the development of the Balanced Vision Plan.
“In 2007, I was at that table because I believed in the Balanced Vision Plan,” Meckfessel said.
Now, however, he opposes the road for three reasons:
- “The toll road is not the Balanced Vision Plan, not in detail and not in spirit”
- “We were told the toll road would help us get the rest of the Balanced Vision Plan. That’s not the case. The trails, lakes, and other amenities are moving ahead, and the toll road has only become a hindrance to the rest of the project.”
- “It has been 16 years since the 1998 bond program. A child in the first grade in 1998 would be graduating college in May. We are a different city than we were in 1998. Things are happening because people don’t want single-family developments and to drive long distances. We have different aspirations as a city.
In the end, in a debate in which so much of the contention on either side revolves around our appetite in this city for change and growth, Meckfessel’s change of heart on the Trinity toll road boiled down to this one simple line:
“We’re smarter than we used to be,” he said.
Recent Comments