A bridge too far

LITTLE ROCK — What happened to an unsuspecting state Highway and Transportation Department was that it encountered—well, what would you call it?

Resistance? Challenge? Common human interaction?

Specifically, a couple of Arkansas mayors—people actually, you know, elected—offered a different idea, independent thinking, vision and a bit of imagination.

Mayors Mark Stodola of Little Rock and Patrick Henry Hays of North Little Rock showed something I hadn’t known was in them, but was delighted to behold.

That would be a partnered hesitance simply to say the pro forma “thank you” when the Highway Department came around with $52 million in Chinese-borrowed federal bridge-replacement money.

They dared to question the routine inevitability of the highway lords’ decree that they would do these surely grateful communities a kind and generous favor.

They would blow up that old Broadway Bridge. Then they would slap down shiny new concrete. Then they would cut a ribbon so that everybody could get on television for being so swell.

That’s the way it has always been, especially over the last six decades.

During that time the Highway Commission has become insulated and exalted through constitutional independence that the voters unwisely granted. That, in turn, has bred a predictable addiction to the way things always have been done, sometimes also known as the arrogance of power.

So the Arkansas highway lords—beholding this new push-back dynamic—behave like a grumpy grandpa. He feels unappreciated for his lifetime of accomplished patriarchy. He stubbornly and huffily resists these smart-aleck kids who think they know better.

The Highway Commission’s position is that this Broadway Bridge is old and that the right of way and engineering plans are in place for a new bridge and that the project has been federally approved. So what else is there to say?

The mayors’ position is that the downtown traffic snarls would be miserable during this project. It’s that we only get about one chance in a century to build a new bridge and that we ought to do it right.

It’s that the Broadway Bridge could be kept standing and refortified and turned into a pedestrian plaza linking popular downtown entertainment venues on both sides of the twin cities—the Robinson Center in Little Rock and the Dickey-Stephens baseball park in North Little Rock.

It’s that all growth has been westward and that it might be better for a new vehicular bridge also to be westward, at, say, Little Rock’s Chester Street.

That amounts to honest-to-goodness vision. These two mayors actually imagine—and seek to advance the real prospect of—a long-term cultural metamorphosis downtown and a different traffic pattern over the next hundred or so years.

Oh, no, says the Highway Department, speaking from the top floor of an unimaginative tower out on the freeway.

We don’t have any plans ready at Chester, it explains. And we’ll lose this $52 million if we don’t spend it now and to replace the Broadway Bridge, it further explains.

So here’s the situation: We have a federal farm bill, voted out of the U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee, that reduces federal aid for Arkansas farmers. We have a chance to expand Medicaid to a quarter-million of our poor people at full federal expense for three years and 90 percent federally paid thereafter, and our Republican state legislators want to decline.

But the one place where Arkansas officialdom wants to insist on getting all due federal money is for blowing up and replacing a bridge the mayors of the connected towns don’t want blown up and replaced.

This state consistently makes a mess of its priorities and inevitably behaves in a way counter to its best human and cultural interests. We dynamite ourselves. We selfimplode. We don’t want any culture. We don’t want any human development. We don’t want any health insurance. We just want different pavement in the same place over the river.

—–––––

John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.