What does an enterprising politician offer to a bored voter?
by Patrick E. Gauen
Southern Illinois voters are BORED, in capital letters. There is no race for governor, or U.S. senator, to occupy center stage in 2000. The window of vulnerability seems past for Democratic Congressman Jerry F. Costello of Belleville, who weathered his once-best friend's obstruction of justice conviction. Republican Congressman John M. Shimkus of Collinsville looks safe for a third term; freshman Democratic Congressman David Phelps of Eldorado is settling in.
Welfare, to the extent of the public attention span, anyway, has been fixed. Campaign finance reform is too complicated to fire up the masses. Thanks to the robust economy, Springfield's pork barrel overflows.
So what does an enterprising politician offer to a bored voter who seems to have everything? Well, around Metro East, the second largest population center of Illinois, there is something the voters really do need. The pols have long been aware, but have pretty much limited themselves to window shopping, thanks to a price tag that is gargantuan even by economic-boom standards.
It's a bridge. A five-hundred-million-dollar bridge to be precise, the kind with miles and miles of approaches and a main structure that spans Old Man River high enough to clear the barges and wide enough to resist a 500-year flood.
| It's a bridge. The kind with miles and miles of approaches and a main structure that spans Old Man River. |
I never knew whether George A. Custer used the Eads Bridge at St. Louis to cross the Mississippi River on his way to infamy at Little Big Horn. But the bridge was there if he needed it, just as the enduring stone-and-iron triple span fills the more mundane need of thousands of light-rail commuters between Illinois and Missouri each weekday some 123 years later.
While the trains run freely at East St. Louis, cars and trucks do not. Lengthening rush hours, gridlocked construction zones and impaired truck commerce may one day do for Southwestern Illinois politicians what the Sioux did for the aforementioned Lt. Col. Custer.
Consider that downtown St. Louis has just three bridges to Illinois, with 16 lanes altogether. And that includes the decrepit McKinley Bridge, owned by the village of Venice, Ill., which is so far in arrears for back St. Louis taxes on its western half that the city might foreclose.
Interstates 55, 64 and 70 funnel across the eight-lane Poplar Street Bridge, finished in 1967 with a planned life of 50 years. A single rush-hour wreck can gridlock river crossings for hours.
The remaining span, the Martin Luther King Jr., is stuck by design with four undivided lanes so narrow that even after expenditure of tens of millions of state rehab dollars, it remains something of a deathtrap.
Planners started getting serious about a new bridge around 10 years ago, saying eight more well-placed lanes would meet the region's needs through 2020. But because it will take up to 10 years to build, there are fears the bridge will be obsolete by the time it goes up.
If we wait much longer, the Illinois Department of Transportation estimates, the morning and evening commuter rushes will last three hours each, and crossing a mile-long bridge might take 45 minutes. Commuters, shoppers, shippers and fans of Cubs-Cardinals games all will face the unpleasant consequences.
That staggering half-billion-dollar price is more than four times the bill for the last Mississippi River span in the region, the dark Bridge, opened in 1994 at Alton. But this one would be wider, longer and dramatically more complicated in its connections.
Nobody has figured out how to pay for it. There are longing looks toward Washington, of course, and even discussion of putting a toll on all the downtown bridges to pay for the new one.
This issue has not quite reached political mass, but there are signs it will. For example, Democratic challenger Rick Verticchio lambasted GOP Congressman Shimkus a year ago for failing to take an active role in building a new bridge. Never mind that Shimkus always did support the bridge, it wouldn't be in his district and nobody had asked for his help in the first place.
Patrick E. Gauen writes an Illinois column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Illinois Issues December 1999 / 41