Mayors lack credentials to endorse freeway

The Arizona Republic
Apr. 26, 2006 12:00 AM  

Mayors Keno Hawker, Steve Berman and Boyd Dunn of Mesa, Gilbert and Chandler, respectively, offer their advice to Ahwatukee and southwest communities on the long-contentious South Mountain 202 freeway link.

None of these men is renowned for exhibiting esteemed leadership in his own community. Mesa leads with red ink hemorrhaging since 2000 with draconian service cuts. Gilbert can't come to a reasonable compromise on fire protection for county islands within its municipal boundaries, a prima facie health and safety requirement for government. Chandler can't manage reasonable esprit de corps within its council, mayor, city manager form of government, instead acting like neighborhood brats in a turf game.

Since you guys can't manage your own "houses" with purpose and accomplishment, "butt out" of our area problem with the South Mountain Freeway. If we need your advice, we'll ask.  

Conversely, to the ill-advised mayors, Jon Talton's commentary (The Arizona Republic, April 16) is prescient, researched and provides foresight to be weighed seriously, discussed, and used as a future mass transportation basis for planning henceforth.

The Arizona Department of Transportation and its enabler, the Maricopa Association of Governments, have not developed verifiable cost data for the South Mountain Freeway link. The figures published, $1 billion to $2.4 billion, are not data verifiable. If $2.4 billion were accurate if contracted and built today, cost per mile would be $92.3 million for the estimated 26-mile length (no terminus yet known at western end).

MAG estimates, per its public statement to The Arizona Republic (April 20), a 25-minute time-saving trip for a 26-mile trip vs. the present 50-mile trip. This equates to $3.7 million per minute time saving. No one, or his time, is worthy of such irresponsible transportation investment.

ADOT and MAG, blindfolded for 23 years since drawing dotted proposed route lines on a map, have played "pin the tail on the donkey." With the South Mountain Freeway they have not hit the target. Ahwatukee has been 98 percent built out since 1983, and the southwest communities affected are growing daily faster than toadstools after spring rains.

Arizona transportation funds will be squandered by ADOT and MAG pressing forward this route, its viable window long since lost. They're the donkeys seeking support from sources unaffected strategically.

This road is a truck bypass since conception in 1982. ADOT, MAG, and HDR, ADOT's high-priced embedded consultant, have acted with gross incompetence in the timed planning and execution of the South Mountain Freeway.

Kill it now.

As Talton wrote, "It's not that freeways are always inappropriate. It's just that they can't solve our total needs for the future. And they can't do this when transportation is totally divorced from what actually happens in development" (i.e. neighborhoods and communities).

He concludes, "But the real insanity is the status quo: doing the same thing, hoping for a different result," (i.e. meaningful relief from traffic congestion and travel stress).

Greta C. Rogers is a 25-year resident of Ahwatukee.