What might have been...

Read Don Woodard's latest about the Trinity River Vision (scheme) in the Fort Worth Businsess Press.   Wake up people!  It's YOUR money.

Cost, cost, cost

The estimated cost of Trinity Uptown has tripled over the years from $300 million to $909 million.

Will the next estimate push it over a billion?

The cost of the boondoggle is calculated on Congress coughing up 50 percent, a Tax Increment Fund 25 percent and local taxpayers 25 percent. Who is to say that the bankrupt Feds will ante up? Or who will guarantee that the TIF will not come a cropper like the Radio Shack TIF did? That leaves it all to the locals! Woe! Woe! Woe!

In lamenting not having the funds to tear down the eyesore barnacle that clings to the Court House,

County Administrator G.K. Maenius said that “If the economy and Radio Shack TIF hadn’t turned south, we probably would have had the money! Probably would have had the money!”

When the wished for Trinity Uptown money disappears into thin air like Bing Thom’s designer bridges, and the chickens come home to roost, I can hear the mournful lament: “If we had only known about this or that turn of events, we probably would have had the money.” In his poem Maud Muller, John Greenleaf Whittier spoke eternal truth:

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

– Don Woodard, Fort Worth