Why is this man smiling?
Ron Kirk absolutely slays me with his lead statement in Sunday’s BeloNews of: "I can tell you unequivocally and emphatically that we never, ever misrepresented the nature of what was being proposed. We were proposing a highway," said former Mayor Ron Kirk, who pushed hard for passage of the Trinity bonds in 1998. In everything we communicated, we made that clear to voters. And the opponents of this project know that. If they’re saying otherwise, it’s totally disingenuous."
Enterprise to Kirk: "There is intelligent life down here."
Disingenuous?! In the fancy brochure, there isn’t even a road at all. Nice word parsing, Ron. In the brochure you unequivocally and emphatically neglected to paint in a toll road. Pot, meet kettle, Ron.
Then we get this fancy bit of "opinion" posing as the reporting of facts: "But a review of city and state documents, court records, news coverage and campaign materials put out by both sides in the months before the 1998 bond vote shows clearly that the city intended to build a tollway inside the levees."
Shows clearly?! Let’s see: no road at all in the fancy brochure; called a ‘parkway’ in other documents. Completely clear? Yea, right.
And "A March 1998 report from the Texas Department of Transportation described the proposed Trinity Parkway as a low-speed road, but added "some design changes could be necessary" if it were built as a toll road instead."
Yup… design changes… which an expanded and a changed voter populace, 10 years later, has every right to vote on this coming November. Why not report that, Belo?
