December 3, 2007

How Wide's the Freeway Momma?

At a recent meeting of the Gang in the Ivory Tower, (Ventura City Council), the "outgoing" Mayor Mr Carl (Not the Mustard) Morehouse, made reference to possibly one day building a cover over the 101 freeway from about San Jon to about Oak st. in order to reconnect the downtown area with the beach. This idea was originally brought forth by Mr Doug Halter and I thought it was fantastic. Obviously that was only a politicians dream, a play on words if you will.

Now the Gang in the Ivory Tower is steadfastly intent on doing something with the California Street bridge over the 101 freeway, beautify, add pedestrian friendly lighting, possibly widening the sidewalks, add some "art in Public places", as a matter of fact they are so ingrained in this idea they have hired an engineering firm(consultant) by the name of HDR Engineering to do a consultant study and write a report on the project. Now as we painfully aware these "consultants" don't work for free as a matter of fact they don't work cheaply either.

Even though we have an entire engineering department within the bowels of the Ivory Tower with a humongous yearly budget the Gang in the Ivory Tower decided to pay HDR Engineering of Irvine California a whopping sum of $209,000 to do this consulting. They are also paying M.A.D. Art inc a sum of $48,000 for artistic design services. I guess the cities art department and all the artists in the city of Ventura couldn't get the job done.

So now we have the Gang in the Ivory Tower spending another $257,000 (1/4 million) before any kind of work will begin. Oh by the way this is only tentative since the bridge is owned by Cal-Trans and they haven't given permission to do anything at all with it.

Rellis Smith
res@venturastuff.com