Uptown wants you to pay for their broken promises
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So let’s get this straight.
Uptown wants to tear up Post Oak Blvd and widen it so they can create two dedicated bus lanes for all these workers desperate to take a bus. They want taxpayers across America to help build flyovers over two freeways so buses can come from transit centers Uptown builds to Uptown.
And they are willing to devastate the sales taxes proceeds Uptown retailers now provide while they are doing it.
The price tag for all this will likely exceed $300 million dollars, even though rush hour surveillance proves only a few workers in Uptown even use the bus to go home. Most Metro bus shelters are empty during the height of rush hour.
If that wasn’t a big enough waste of money, now Uptown is breaking promises to METRO and that means they are breaking promises to you.
Uptown now wants YOU to pay for fiber communications and security cameras on the proposed Post Oak bus stations. 11 million dollars for a city already strapped financially, even though those unelected bureaucrats in Uptown preside over a huge amount of tax money they get to keep all for themselves.
The Vice Chairman of Metro Jim Robinson thinks he knows why. “What I suspect is the problem is they are paying themselves so much for right of way, they no longer have the money to do this.”
Uptown has to buy the right of way of 34 different pieces of land to widen Post Oak for the two unneeded bus lanes. So far they have only closed on 2 real estate deals
Remember all that stuff about transparency from Uptown, how they have gone the extra mile to make sure they don’t hide stuff from you? That is what those expensive PR folks tried to peddle.
We now know some of the people who will make the most money on those right of way deals are members of the Uptown Management District and the Uptown TIRZ. Transparent Uptown refuses to tell us whose property has been appraised for what. They refuse to show you the real estate contracts or the purchase price. The Mayor hasn’t done anything.
“We have called on top officials at Uptown to resign, but they won’t because the politicians who appointed them obviously don’t care they are deceiving taxpayers”, says Jim Scarborough, President of the Uptown Business and Property Owners Association. “Candidates for Houston Mayor need to promise publicly they will stop this horrible project before another penny is wasted.”
Metro Board Members have been told they may have to spend more than 40 million dollars more on this project, a lot of it to buy special buses to go down those special lanes. Of course, that is your money.
Does it matter to anyone that the regular buses we already bought for Post Oak are nearly empty?
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