"Bad blood is boiling over a tollroad in our Garden of Eden." That’s how Sportsradio 1310 The Ticket commentator Gordon Keith opened his show last week featuring a Trinity River debate between Councilwoman Angela Hunt and former Mayor Ron Kirk. Did anyone catch it? If not and you want to see some sparring, you can view it here (though I had problems with buffering and such).
I heard about the show from a friend of mine, Steve Luthye, who’s a member of local band The Slack, which performed on the same show. (Lead singer Chris Holt lives in our neighborhood, and I think at least one other band member does as well.) The band was stuck in the green room with Hunt and Kirk before the show, forced to watch them verbally attack each other over the details of the project. "They really hate each other," Steve told me, and when I asked about the particulars of the argument, he couldn’t come up with any. I guess their disgust of each other was the only lasting impact they made, and perhaps that says something about how most Dallasites view this fight.
Either my Internet browser or WFAA Channel 8’s website kept me from watching the full show, but I did make it through the first half of the Hunt-Kirk debate. Kirk explained it as a project solving a lot of different problems; compared the current debate to the one over the American Airlines arena; and said that after all of the study, the land between the levees is the best possible location for the road. Hunt argued that what was sold to Dallas was an iconic park, and now the city is going to put $1 billion of concrete in it. When Kirk argued that she was inflating the number (he seemed to say it was more like $250,000 or $350,000), she shot back that she was just quoting the DMN — "your favorite." When Hunt said it was originally supposed to be a low-speed road and Kirk jumped in and said that wasn’t true, she sourced TxDOT.
By the way, when I scrolled down on Keith’s website, I saw that it was designed by Lake Highlands residents Ben Jenkins and Travis McElroy, who make up the creative branding and website development team Onefastbuffalo.
Also, if you want to see The Slack in concert, they’ll be at Gezellig this Wednesday, Sept. 26, and again on Wednesday, Oct. 10 at 10 p.m. That’s my friend Steve in the photo, on keyboards.
