Last Wednesday I was in the DFW zone and drove by the mess again. Little has been cleaned up, that I made note of, since I last saw this a couple months ago.
And driving around the "art installation" which locals refer to as an homage to an aluminum trash can, I found myself freshly appalled and freshly perplexed as to how and why this part of the overall TRV embarrassment came to be.
In about a month it will be four years since the Trinity River Vision's project manager. J.D. Granger, and his mother, Kay, along with other perpetrators of this nonsense, had a TNT exploding ceremony to mark the start of construction of three simple little bridges being built over dry land to connect the Fort Worth mainland to an imaginary island.
Four years later those simple bridges are no where near being anything anyone can drive over, and are currently multiple V shaped forms, some with cement added. Locals have taken to calling these modern day Stonehedges the Yeehaw Seesaws.
A short time after that TNT exploding ceremony another ceremony was held, nearby, to mark the installation of that beautiful work of art you see above. This sets in the middle of an uncompleted, unlandscaped, weed and litter infested roundabout, which is part of the Boondoggle's bridge building effort.
This beautiful work of art cost around $1 million.
Why were these million bucks spent for this homage to an aluminum trash can years before the roundabout and the Boondoggle's bridges were completed?
How did the commission to install this homage to an aluminum trash can come about?
Did the million bucks benefit a friend or colleague of anyone in a position to influence such a wasteful expenditure?
Someone in the Trinity River Vision Authority or the TRWD?
Such as when a sweetheart deal was instigated by the TRWD's Jim Lane to help a friend suffering cash flow woes, with that sweetheart deal having the TRWD buy up some of the suffering friend's property, which later became the first drive-in of the 21st century, located due south of La Grave Field, a rundown baseball park, which was the beneficiary of a recent TRWD sweetheart deal helping another TRWD crony in financial distress.
Why was it so important to spend a million bucks on this homage to an aluminum trash can? It's not like the Trinity River Vision is flush with funds.
Just last May the TRV and its parent, the TRWD, used ballot shenanigans to put a measure on the ballot to raise a quarter billion bucks supposedly for flood control and drainage.
When flood control and drainage was not what the quarter billion bucks was for, which we learned last month from TRWD District Manager, Jim Oliver, who told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, with nary a hint of shame, that "the approval of the bond sales by about two-thirds of voters was very important. It’s going to allow us to complete the project, keep it online and on track.The money is needed to buy land, rechannel 1.5 miles of the river and build water storage areas and floodgates."
We blogged about this subterfuge, and other related issues wondering why the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Is Unable To Answer Why Boondoggle Bridges Take So Long To Build.
Why aren't the Fort Worth locals demanding some answers to all the problems which have blinded the Trinity River Vision? Why does no one ask why, if this, which was sold as a vitally needed flood control and economic development scheme, is so vitally needed, why is the project progressing in slow motion, year after year, decade after decade?
It seems the only ones who have benefited economically from this scheme have been the Granger Gang and that gang's cronies, with one of the prime beneficiaries being Kay Granger's son, J.D., a lower tier attorney who was given the job of being what has become, under his unqualified, inept leadership, America's Biggest Boondoggle, for which he is compensated, annually around $200,000, plus perks.
Would any modern American city, wearing its big boy pants, tolerate such outrageous nepotism? The answer is no. Such can only take place in American backwards backwaters, locations modern America has sort of given up on.
The people of Fort Worth really need to wise up and take their town back from these grifters.
That is what should happen, would happen, in a modern American city, but it won't happen in Fort Worth, because it has never been the Fort Worth Way to be a modern American city...
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