Trinity River Border Fiasco

Don't miss Don Woodard's letter in the Fort Worth Business Press today.  Texas, tell your friends in other states - they too are paying for it.

Fencing Fiasco

A recent headline read, “Border Fence Scrapped, Called a Fiasco.”

Several members of Congress, among them Sen. Joe Lieberman, have said that the “virtual fence” project along 53 miles of the Arizona – Mexican border, costing at least $15 million per mile, was a waste of taxpayers’ money and should have been stopped sooner.

The fence, initiated in 2005, was to be a network of cameras, ground sensors and radars that would be used to spot incursions. It was supposed to have been operational this year. At a cost of $15 million a mile, the 53 mile abandoned project cost us $795 million.

It is difficult to understand why Congress have their ruffles up over the waste of $795,000 for this 53 mile border security project and yet have remained silent regarding the waste rampant in Fort Worth’s nepotistic one mile long economic development, pseudo-flood control project called Trinity Uptown. At last count, the eminent domain land grab earmark was pegged to cost nearly a billion dollars.

When the Tea Party people newly-arrived on scene in the nation’s capital get wind of the Fort Worth boondoggle that, in the pungent description of John Randolph, “shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight,” I foresee a reprise banner headline proclaiming, Trinity Uptown Project Scrapped, Called a Fiasco.”

Don Woodard, Fort Worth