Put State Funding to Good Use

A big piece of the price tag comes from state tax payers shelling out $35 million a year for 40 years in gap funding – now estimated to total of $565 million. At least it was that way until the NC State legislature voted in the 2010 session to strip $15 million from Garden Parkway gap funding and put it with another $31 million towards replacing the state's mission-critical I-85 bridge over the Yadkin River. See for yourself by clicking here and going to page 155 of the budget bill. The 55 year old Yadkin River bridge is in such bad shape that for the past several years it has gotten the state's lowest safety rating. Of course, this $46 million still falls well short of the $136 million it will take to replace the bridge, which carries 70,000 cars a day.

It makes perfect sense to fix the roads and bridges we have already got instead of building even more roads and bridges we can't keep up. Taking the $15 million from the GP gap funding proves that gap funding can be redeployed to any project the legislature wants. If this community were smart, we would be lobbying hard to get those funds directed to the county's most important projects -- fixing the I-85 US 321 interchange, or the crumbling US 74 bridges over the Catawba and South Fork Rivers, or widening I-85 at the Belmont bottleneck.

Building the Garden Parkway is like adding on a new room when the roof over the big house still leaks. Plain and simple, we don’t need a Garden Parkway of asphalt, noise, commercial growth, urban sprawl and wasteful spending. We need our critical needs attended to and our quality of life maintained. When we can’t even fix the crumbling bridges, awful interchanges and potholes in the roads we have already got, why are government bureaucrats even thinking about building a brand new highway we can’t afford to keep up?