Liberal Milwaukee Trolley – I mean Folly
When will the left, especially in the Milwaukee area, ever learn? Trains were breaking edge technology in the 1830′s, know what they are now?!?!? A novelty….It’s fun to take the kids to East Troy during Christmas to see how the citizens of East Troy and surrounding areas made their way into “the Big City” for a quarter, but a funny thing happened over the past 180+ years….CARS and FREEWAYS. Now we have to listen to the inane ramblings of our do nothing mayor and all of his rail supporters propose stupid expenditures that help nobody. Now I can (and will) wax poetic on the stupidity of many, if not all, of the rail proposals for Milwaukee, SE Wisconsin and surrounding areas, but the Milwaukee Trolley, I mean Folly, takes the freaking cake.
The idea in and of itself is dumb. The beginning route is going to cost $64.6 million dollars, paid for by federal tax dollars set aside for garbage such as this, to the tune of $55 million. The other $9 millions will be dealt with by instituting a TIF district (yeah, and THAT doesn’t hurt the tax payer). The best part of this “project” is the proposed maintenance costs of $2.65 million (and I would argue that cost is extremely low) would be handled by fares, parking revenue (which is limited by ripping up road for trolley rail) and corporate sponsorships. My prediction is that Northwestern Mutual, Johnson Controls and other large corporations better pony up a boat load of money because if the ridership of the bus system is any indication as to how many people will ride this debacle, the tax payers are in for a huge cost responsiblity. Here’s another great addition to this project – that $64.6 cost I mentioned earlier?!?! Yeah, that’s for 1.8 miles of rail line. If I’m doing my math correctly, the base cost (not including overruns and the additional costs I’ll discuss later) is almost $36 MILLION dollars per mile. Another quick “funny” side note to this is, they will want to expand this line (as you’ll see in the attached URL).
Now comes the best part: the Folly rail line didn’t take into account, when they were proposing this to the Common Council and the taxpayers, the fact that AT&T, WE Energies, and other utility lines would have to be moved. You might say to yourself, “come on, how hard can it be?!?!” Well, according to the utility companies it could cost an additional $55 million dollars or MORE to reroute…..$55 million MORE!!!! The more I read about this, and many other rail projects around the area, the more I cringe. If Milwaukee goes through with this, it is proof positive that Liberals and specifically Milwaukee Democrats have absolutely no concept of economics. Milwaukee couldn’t afford this in the 90′s to the mid 2000′s, when the economy was good, what person or persons could ever justify one of the worst expenditures of money ever proposed?!?!? Don’t answer that, Tom Barrett and Milwaukee Democrats already have.
