A few thoughts after last night’s Trinity tollroad debate:
• Craig Holcomb, speaking for the anti-referendum side, said we need the tollroad because traffic is so bad in the Mixmaster. He’s kidding, right? The audience, 30 or 40 people who came out despite the rain, was very polite. No one laughed.
• Holcomb, who did good work for the neighborhood when he was on the City Council and is a long-time friend of the Advocate, must have done something pretty awful to be forced to shill for these people. He said we can’t have a referendum because it will disenfranchise everyone who voted for the park in the original bond election. Note to anti-referendum group: It’s not in very good taste for a group controlled by mostly Anglo southern men, who have long experience with real, Martin Luther King-style disenfranchising, to use that argument.
• The referendum isn’t necessary, said Holcomb, because everyone who voted in the original bond election should have known this was going to be a high-speed toll road. This information, though not in the ballot proposal, was in the briefing packets available at City Hall, if we had gone down there and asked for them. Again, the audience showed its class. No one keeled over from a laughter-induced heart attack.
• The audience, as would be expected of Advocate readers, asked intelligent, sensible questions and seemed almost as well informed on the issues as Holcomb and Angela Hunt, who argued the pro-referendum side. One question, for which no one had an answer: If we build the tollroad, which doesn’t allow for access to the park, where will the money come from to build the roads that will allow access?
