Former Mayor Laura Miller: Six-lane, high-speed Trinity River toll road ‘should not be built at all’
Add former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller to the growing list of former Trinity River toll road champions opposing six lanes of high-speed concrete between the levees.
Says Miller, “the reason the road should go away” is because it has become “just an airplane runway instead of a park.”
In an email sent to to Dallas City Council member (and toll road opponent) Scott Griggs, and in a follow-up interview with The Dallas Morning News Friday morning, Miller says she wishes the city had built the low-speed, four-lane parkway envisioned by planners responsible for the Balanced Vision Plan adopted by the Dallas City Council in the fall of 2003. But that proposal has been parked by the city’s beloved Alternative 3C, a nearly nine-mile-long, six-lane-wide, $1.5-billion high-speed toll road along the east levee of the Trinity.
Says Miller in her letter to Griggs, “if the road cannot be built as originally envisioned by those of us who fought for a landscaped, low-impact, four-lane solution, the road should not be built at all. Over these past 11 years, the lakes have gotten much smaller, and the road has become much bigger. The result is not a good one.”
This is the first time Miller, who served as mayor from 2002 through ’07, has publicly spoken about the road since the 2007 referendum, when then-council member Angela Hunt led the charge to kill the high-speed slab of highway planned along the river. It’s certainly not the first time she’s been asked about the project. But with the Trinity River toll road once again a daily headline, and with Mayor Mike Rawlings’ so-called dream team of nationally renowned urban designers and transportation planners due to give the road another look in coming days, Miller felt it was time to dip her toe into the Trinity again.
“A number of people have asked me in the last couple of months, and I really didn’t want to get into the fray,” she says. “But as more people asked me, I think it’s reasonable I have a response.” She laughs. “I do feel that since Mayor Rawlings is taking a fresh look at it that everybody who’s had a hand in trying to develop the river give him their opinions, and this is my opinion.”
Among those hired to give Rawlings that fresh look is Alex Krieger, an urban design professor at Harvard and the man Miller helped bring to town to fashion what became known as the Balanced Vision Plan for the Trinity. Krieger and transportation planner Bill Eager proposed the parkway in 2002, after the North Texas Tollway Authority and Halff & Associates initially proposed building roads along both sides of the Trinity. In September of this year Krieger returned to Dallas to apologize for his road proposal, which has morphed into the massive highway project from which it now appears.
In recent months, former toll road proponents have become its most vocal opponents, among them the Dallas chapter of the American Institute of Architects, local architects and planners (Larry Good, Ralph Hawkins, Bob Meckfessel) and D publisher Wick Allison. Miller now joins their ranks, convinced the city, the Federal Highway Administration, the NTTA and other agencies will never allow anything larger than the six-lane highway depicted in renderings under final review by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies. As Miller and Hunt point out, the Corps said following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that it will not allow landscaping in the floodway, which means the Balanced Vision Plan has essentially been dead for close to a decade.
“What we agreed to in 2002 — a meandering parkway with landscaping, this bucolic jaunt next to the lakes — all but disappeared because the Corps said, ‘You can’t put landscaping and concrete in a river bed,’” Miller says, “When that happened — and I was still [mayor] when Katrina hit — we all saw the change of tone, but we thought you could do things to mitigate the threat and do the road as envisioned.”
But since then, she says, the toll road — the entire Trinity River Corridor Project, in fact — has grown into that airport runway. And, finally, enough’s enough.
“I admire Laura for coming out and taking this step,” says Angela Hunt. “She didn’t have to do this. She didn’t have to be public about this. She hasn’t asked for any press. She was kind enough to respond and was comfortable sharing her position on the road. In Dallas it takes a lot for people to refine their position. But the facts on the ground have changed, and I respect someone who would take the time to come forward — especially a former mayor — to say, ‘My opinion on this has changed.’”
When asked why the so-called “zombie tollroad” still lives at this late date — when it’s short hundreds of millions of dollars needed for its construction, when polls and town halls suggest voters no longer want it, when West Dallas and Oak Cliff have blossomed without it — Miller says the answer’s easy: Too many have too much tied up in seeing it built.
“There are business constituencies who make money building massive highways,” she says. “But I think there are very few large projects the business community community holds on to as being transformative, like DFW Airport was, and I think this is one of those projects. I campaigned against it when I ran for mayor, but the minute I was elected I was shocked at the tsunami of feedback I got from the Dallas infrastructure about why we needed to move forward on this plan as voted on. And one of the things, unseen but very much there, is city hall and the business community for 16 years have teamed up and gone up to Washington and begged Congress and the president for money for this project. It’s a little bit of not wanting to say, ‘King’s X, sorry we took all those millions from you, we changed our mind.’ That’s pretty hard to do.
“There’s a strong sense of seeing it through, because so much money, time, effort and political capital has been spent on it. That’s the No. 1 reason it survives. That affected me. I went from campaigning hard against it to, ‘Oh, boy, what do we do? I guess we better redesign it.’ I remember [then-U.S. Sen.] Kay Bailey Hutchison taking me out for coffee five minutes after I was elected going, ‘Do you know how many years I spent helping city hall get this built? What are you going to do now — just unravel it?’”
Laura Miller Trinity Toll Road Letter
Trinity Parkway Rendering by Robert Wilonsky
