Fort Worth Business Press Up A Creek Regarding Mary Kelleher

Last night my phone received a perplexing text message from a message texter I will call "TEXTER".

The text message from TEXTER and followup text messages from ME.

TEXTER: I thought you said Mary Kelleher had filed to run for the TRWD water board again?

ME: Yes, that is correct, she filed on the first day it was possible to do so. Why are you asking me this?

TEXTER: Because I read a good article about Fort Worth's embarrassing boondoggle and it mentioned other people running, with no mention made of Mary running.

ME: Well, that makes no sense. Was this in the Star-Telegram? I think we have fairly well established that that make believe newspaper is not to be relied on.

TEXTER: No, I read this in an article in the Fort Worth Business Press.

ME: Really? That publication is the closest Fort Worth comes to having a real newspaper. Can you email me the link to this article?

TEXTER: Okay.

And by this morning TEXTER had emailed me the referenced link to Richard Connor: Up the creek and headed nowhere – Panther Island redux

Well, reading the article I first have to say, it is a good article detailing much of what is so wrong about what used to be the Trinity River Vision, til it morphed into being America's Biggest Boondoggle.

The article mentions that two men have filed to run in the May 4 election for a spot on the TRWD board. And the article mentions that the pair of current board members up for re-election, Marty Leonard and Jim Lane, have not yet filed.

But the article makes absolutely no mention of former TRWD board member, Mary Kelleher, having filed to run again.

However two comments to the article do point out this odd omission. I'll get to those comments later.

First let's look at the mention made of the two men who have filed, C.B. Team and Gary Moates.

Both Charles “C.B.” Team, vice-president and principal at the real estate company Ellis & Tinsley, and Attorney Gary M. Moates plan to run.

Fort Worth, as we all know, is a small/big city. And on the day he filed, there was Moates shopping at Central Market. He is energetic and full of ideas for change and he was more than willing to stop traffic at the checkout counter to talk about the river project and his hopes to alter the winding course it has taken.

I have yet to be told anything troubling about Gary Moates. I can not say the same for C.B. Team. We learned about the concerns about C.B. Team when we learned Deep Moat II Was Concerned CB Team Not Fit For TRWD Board.

This FWBP article also makes positive mention of the TRWD board's new members, elected in the last TRWD board election.

Candidates are filing to run for the water board, folks who have had enough and who know this problem can begin to be fixed by the voters in the May 4 election. The board has five members and two have emerged as leaders for good government, James Hill and Leah King. One more vote and a flood of change could happen, a virtual cascade of solid procedures and good management.

Til reading the above I had read nothing about James Hill and Leah King having any sort of good impact on the TRWD board. The pair certainly have made no news doing so, of the sort Mary Kelleher regularly made.

Now, let's look at some of  what this article has to say about that which has become America's Biggest Boondoggle. The first four paragraphs...

The folks responsible for running the Panther Island project – running it into the ground, some might say – are giving new meaning to that old saying about “being up the creek without a paddle.”

They don’t even have a boat.

Here we are nearly a month into 2019 and we’re still dogged by a story that was not new but had mostly lain dormant until exploding into public awareness late last year: Panther Island, originally called and more commonly known as the Trinity River Vision project, has been horrendously mismanaged and is totally out of control.

A better name might be: Trinity River Lack of Vision.

I thought the above four paragraphs were almost poetic. Though I have to take some exception to the statement saying the story had mostly lain dormant til exploding last year. Seems like myself, and many others, have been pointing out the fact that the Trinity River Vision has been a failing mismanaged Boondoggle for years. And an ongoing embarrassment for Fort Worth, which keeps getting worse, as in more and more embarrassing.

And then this about the Boondoggle's three pitiful little bridges stuck being built in slow motion, over dry land...

The latest news is that construction of the project’s three infamous bridges over not troubled water but in fact no water has fallen further behind schedule. The earliest projected completion date for any of the bridges is late summer 2020. That would be the bridge on White Settlement Road. The nearby Henderson Street bridge won’t be finished before spring 2021, officials say, while the North Main Street leg of the waterless triumvirate is not expected to be ready for traffic until at least late winter 2021.

It is incomprehensible to me why this slow motion bridge building fiasco has not dealt the death blow to the entire embarrassing, mis-managed, corrupt Boondoggle

And then the following two paragraphs hit a particularly loud BINGO...

The Panther Island debacle is managed, or mismanaged, by the Trinity River Vision Authority, which is an offshoot of the Tarrant Regional Water District, the agency charged with overall responsibility for the plan when it was conceived decades ago as a flood control project. Since then, it has grown into a massive economic development undertaking that involves rerouting the Trinity River to create recreational and business activities along a San Antonio-like riverwalk with a newly created island as the centerpiece.

The water district’s board of directors, its general manager Jim Oliver and River Vision Authority executive director J.D. Granger have brought precious little expertise and efficiency to the project but they have managed to bury it in arrogance, obfuscation and even flat-out deception.

Well, nothing to add to what is being said in the above two paragraphs. Except maybe to say the above is the reason #FIRE JD stickers are appearing all over Fort Worth in various locations, including car bumpers and toilet seats.

The following two paragraphs contain an element we blogged about recently...

Water board elections historically draw low voter turnout, which tends to favor incumbents rather than challengers. The two seats up for election this time are currently held by longtime board members Jim Lane and Marty Leonard, who bought a full-page ad in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Jan. 9 to “set the record straight” on Panther Island. The ad was self-serving palaver, a tedious rehash of official explanations and rationalizations for the mess the project has become.

A better tack would have been for Lane and Leonard to apologize for wasting taxpayer money, for being rubber stamps for errant policies and executive arrogance: “We apologize and will do better.”

That full page propaganda advertisement in the Star-Telegram was so absurdly self-serving we felt compelled to Set The Crooked TRWD Record Straight.

Unlike articles in the Star-Telegram, which rarely generate any comments, the Fort Worth Business Press regularly generates worthwhile comments worth reading, including the three below, two of which mention the error of not mentioning the fact that Mary Kelleher is running again for the TRWD board....

Clyde Picht Jan 18, 2019 4:45pm
We can be sure that Oliver's competence was questionable when he hired Granger for what was then a $435M project. He should have been fired by the board when he refused new board member, Mary Kelleher, access to the building and documents she had every right to. Granger on the other hand probably wasn't much of a lawyer if he thought he could walk into a job for which he should have known he was unqualified and unprepared to accept. Well what the heck, it's all taxpayers' money so who's going to complain?

johnmac70 Jan 19, 2019 3:27pm
Richard Conner, you forgot to mention in the article that Mary Kelleher has filed for candidacy on the TRWD. She will fight for accountability and transparency on a board that is famous for the opposite. The Panther Island project is in reality a developers project. Who will benefit the most from the project? Not not the citizens of Fort Worth but developers who will make millions on condos, multi use developments and townhomes. This project is a debacle and an embarrassment for FW!! Stop it now!

kafcampbell Jan 22, 2019 7:56am
I'm not a meteorologist or agronomist, but I do know what the weather is like. I'm baffled as to why the current flood control system, put in place after the 1949 Flood Disaster, is no longer viable. Have we had catastrophic flooding that the Trinity River project thingy is going to prevent? We've had the same weather for decades: hot summers, cold winters, rain that comes all at once, occasional catastrophic winter storms. Yes, Fort Worth has struggled with street and neighborhood flooding, including tragic loss of life. But this project thingy isn't slated to resolve any of those issues... Could it be because those other actually street and neighborhood flooding issues are in lower income parts of town? Hmmm. Exactly what civil engineering problem are we needing fixed? Those levees around the Panther Island thingy and 7th Street have been working marvelously. I drive over them every day and I've not seen a weather event in 30 years that even started to tax the system we set up decades ago and already paid for. Can someone dispute me? Also, put back White Settlement Road as a critical thoroughfare into and out of downtown.
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I also noticed that this FWBP article used the verbiage "Up the Creek". That verbiage is quite close to the title of the award winning documentary, "Up a Creek".

Up a Creek documents that which turned one Tarrant County resident into a community activist working to get the local, state and federal governments to do the right thing regarding flooding issues in Tarrant County, rather than wasting resources on an ill-conceived, ineptly implemented pseudo public works project the public did not approve of via the voting method.

In the Up a Creek video you will meet that community activist, and others, such as Clyde Picht, he being the author of the first comment, above. Clyde Picht famously opines in the video that the Star-Telegram could put an end to the Trinity River Vision nonsense if it wanted to do the right thing. I may be slightly paraphrasing from memory regarding Mr. Picht's words.

I also show up in this documentary. But, blink and you will miss it. Elsie Hotpepper can also be seen, if you know where to look.

And here is part one of the Up a Creek documentary video...