By: Diane Benjamin
Normal will have to keep tossing money to their Tiger Grant Application Service. Just since May 2018, they have spent $348,389.08 trying to get free money: https://blnnews.com/2018/10/15/normal-is-following-the-plan/
The only BUILD (Tiger) grant in Illinois went to Springfield for high-speed rail – see PDF page 27: https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/policy-initiatives/327856/build-fact-sheets-121118-355pm-update.pdf
The announcement was made yesterday.
Where is the other $22,000,000 coming from?
This article is from THREE years ago: https://www.progressiverailroading.com/high_speed_rail/article/The-Chicago-to-St-Louis-higher-speed-rail-project-nears-finish-line–46379
The cost of this project then was almost $2 BILLION dollars.
The goal was to make this 5 1/2 hour trip 4 1/2 hours. The cost is certainly much higher by now and the project isn’t close to done. Send thanks to Dick Durbin for this union payoff. The longer the project takes the better it is for them. How many billions is an hour worth?
I hope State Motor Fuel Tax isn’t going to this project. Even with a Constitutional Amendment stating it can only be used for roads, that doesn’t mean it is. According to this website: https://www.irtba.org/GasTax
$300,000,000 from the road fund was diverted to pay for transit. Transit, transit, . . . hum . . . would that be so Connect Transit can continue to destroy local infrastructure with empty buses?
Or, by transit do they mean rail?
Happy gas tax increase, even what’s left of the Republican party in Illinois isn’t fighting it.
Stealing more from you is how every level of government in Illinois operates, the party doesn’t matter.
Normal is still hoping to get one of the two CRISI Grants that they applied for. Those announcements have yet to be made. But after the BUILD snub, I feel there may be some doubt in the minds of Town administrators as to whether or not this underpass will happen. My own personal sense is that many in the Town, along with it’s citizens, are growing weary of the whole thing.
The projects being funded aren’t luxury items, the underpass is.
The residents of Normal are pissed at Koos and his Utopia vision for Normal. Took long enough! Anyway, even the lefties are turning on Koos. It’s corporate welfare for out of town developers and snake oil salesman with their hands out. Uptown vacancies and unfulfilled promises are on full display, reminding taxpayers every day of the failures of government-led economic development.
Let’s LOOK at some facts! I.S.U. has been there 150 years+ and HOW MANY people have been killed on the tracks-YES, some were suicides! EVEN counting them, it’s NOT WORTH building some UPTOWN, underpass/bridge decoration so that Koo-koo-Koos can claim yet another “shallow” victory for his UPTOWN, Master Plan, One Uptown Mudhole, Abnormal 2.1 dream utopia where everyone lives in a $4600 a month UPTOWN cubicle next to the UPTOWN offices.
IF these COLLEGE children cannot figure out NOT to walk across the tracks when a train is coming, well then, SOME gene pools need chlorine.. WHAT next a grant for the Pine street Rt 66 History museum? HAHA!
A friend JUST emailed me with a VALID question-WHAT is RIVIAN/UPTOWN going to do with ALL those VW’s in the Mitsubishi parking lot?? They’ll NEED to move them soon to make way for all those NEW RIVIAN trucks.
Good thing Koos turned down building a bridge (on somebody else’s dime even, iirc) at the time… Seems ironic that the bike trails are, to many people, dead ends at ‘uptown’…
Since they are ignoring the gas constitutional amendment we need to ignore the pension amendment as well.
Or we need to take the state to court on the gas amendment.
If the Normal council would stop buying property and then turn around and give it away. If the Normal council would stop all the “donating” to ISU and Advocate and Rivian. If the Normal Council would stop the trips, the lunches & the gifts they would have the TAXPAYER money to build the underpass.