Summary of highway bill funding for Florida
President Bush signed a $286 Billion transportation bill yesterday.
Among the projects for Florida:
Among the projects for Florida:
- An additional $ 10 million added to the already funded $80 million for I-75 expansion from four to six lanes in Collier and Lee counties.
- $10.4 million to build an interchange at Interstate 95 and the Pineda Expressway for the extension project that will connect beachside and the Suntree area to I-95 just north of Melbourne.
- $ 3 million to Miami-Dade County to help plan the proposed $ 1.5 billion tunnel under Biscayne Bay from the Port of Miami to Downtown.
- $ 4 million for proposed route 9B which will link route 9A and I-95 on the southside of Jacksonville. The route 9B when complete will carry the Interstate designation I-795.
- An additional $13 million for South Florida's Tri Rail Commuter rail system.
posted by Kartik at 9:09 AM
7 Comments:
Niether the I-75 reversable lanes in Broward nor the reconstruction of I-395 in Miami were funded.
Jeff said...
Who the hell cares? Are you trying to promote Bush in Florida by giving him credit for this bill.
9:55 AM
I think we should give all the credit for this bill to Bush and the rest of the tax and spend, big-government Republicans.
What an embarrassing pork-filled piece of legislation. Do you think Bush knows what a veto is?
Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave!
I believe they are studying the feesibility of tunnel because cruise ships cannot clear the current bridge and the waters are not deep enough to build a cable stayed or suspension bridge across to Watson Island where the port is.
While it maybe characterized as pork by some, I can hardly think of anything that I personally believe the Government should spend money on more than transportation and infrastructure.
Thanks to the previous few administrations and stinginess of Tom DeLay and Dick Armey in House we allowed our roads and bridges to further decline in this nation over the past several years to the point we have several bridges under collapse and gridlock in almost every major metropolitan city in the country. Europe and Japan have done far more to invest public works projects than has the United States and the results have shown- products and people move faster and more efficiently through every other major industrial nation than through the United States.
I am loyal Democrat, but hats off to the Congress who in bipartisan way passed this very important legislation. And shame on the Republican congress for not passing this sooner.
To answer Gregg's question, the new tunnel would link the Port with I-395 directly thus allowing truck and commercial traffic to avoid Biscayne Blvd and downtown. right now the only entrance to the Port dumps on to US 1 right in front of the American Airlines Arena and since most of this very same traffic uses I-395 it makes sense to get the large trucks off of a 4 lane surface road which carries lots of downtown and special event traffic. The trucks take Biscayne Blvd for all of 3 blocks until they get on I-395 West.
Also I should have mentioned almost full matching funding for a new Turnpike interchange at Stirling Road was also given in the legislation. This will give a direct link to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.
FYI, Miami-Dade County is studying the possibility of replacing several aging bridges over the Miami River with Tunnels.
Why can't a more affordable bridge be built to the port rather than a tunnel?
The bridge would need a very high clearance, perhaps as high as 200 feet, which just is not logical given the logistics of the area.
From the (liberal?) Washington Post:
Big-Government Conservatives
Monday, August 15, 2005; A14
THREE TIMES in the past quarter-century, conservative leaders have promised to restrain wasteful government spending. President Ronald Reagan tried it and showed he was at least half-serious by vetoing the pork-laden 1987 transportation bill. House Speaker Newt Gingrich tried it and risked his party's electoral standing by battling to restrain the growth in programs such as Medicare. And President Bush has tried it, declaring on numerous occasions that he expected spending restraint from Congress. None of these efforts proved politically sustainable. As The Post's Jonathan Weisman and Jim VandeHei reported Thursday, Mr. Bush's attempt at spending discipline has been especially limp.
Back in 1987, when Mr. Reagan applied his veto to what was generally known at the time as the highway and mass transit bill, he was offended by the 152 earmarks for pet projects favored by members of Congress. But on Wednesday Mr. Bush signed a transportation bill containing no fewer than 6,371 earmarks. Each one of these, as Mr. Reagan understood but Mr. Bush apparently doesn't, amounts to a conscious decision to waste taxpayers' dollars. One point of an earmark is to direct money to a project that would not receive money as a result of rational judgments based on cost-benefit analyses.
Mr. Bush, who had threatened to veto wasteful spending bills, chose instead to cave in. He did so despite the fact that in addition to a record number of earmarks the transportation bill came with a price tag that he had once called unacceptable. The bill has a declared cost of $286 billion over five years plus a concealed cost of a further $9 billion; Mr. Bush had earlier drawn a line in the sand at $256 billion, then drawn another line at $284 billion. Asked to explain the president's capitulation, a White House spokesman pleaded that at least this law would be less costly than the 2003 Medicare reform. This is a classic case of defining deviancy down.
The nation is at war. It faces large expenses for homeland security. It is about to go through a demographic transition that will strain important entitlement programs. How can this president -- an allegedly conservative president -- believe that the federal government should spend money on the Red River National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center in Louisiana? Or on the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan? The bill Mr. Bush has signed devotes more than $24 billion to such earmarked projects, continuing a trend in which the use of earmarks has spread steadily each year. Remember, Republicans control the Senate and the House as well as the White House. So somebody remind us: Which is the party of big government?
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