Monday, June 15, 2009

MoDot intends to extend highway 141 from Ladue road to the Page extension in west St. Louis county. The purpose of this extension is to encourage commercial development of land owned by the cities of Maryland Heights, Creve Coeur, and Chesterfield. MoDot's motivation for expansion is jobs for their people and increased tax revenue for the cities. The city's hope is that nonexistent businesses will want to locate in a flood plain in the very part of the country with the highest rate of economic decline.

Their traffic model constraints, variables, and assumptions are a joke.

Some development of highway 141 may be needed to alleviate traffic congestion, but MoDot has produced a massive, wasteful plan for highway expansion that will misuse 65 million dollars of taxpayer money.

There is a glut of available commercial real estate and high unemployment in St Louis.

Job losses in the automotive and aerospace industries have had a substantial and long lasting affect on the St. Louis economy. Those jobs are gone. They aren't coming back. There are no industries with the potential to replace those lost jobs in the near term.

St. Louisans are furious that money is being spent to create a massive west county outer loop that will do no more than destroy what little remains of the wetland and wildlife corridors in the area.

Why can't a more reasonable highway extension be built with less cost incurred? Why can't some of this money be put to good use creating jobs for the region? Many people in the area realize St. Louis is a great rear view mirror city. They are leaving for Texas, the east coast, even overseas. Work has already begun on this massive waste of taxpayer funds. St. Louisans watched half of the city of Bridgeton get wiped off the map to add a runway to Lambert airport when a runway was not needed. When will we ever learn?

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