ALDOT and bridge proponents are still NOT LISTENING

The problem with the Mobile River Bridge & Bayway Project is NOT the toll. The problem is much deeper and more complex than that. At any toll rate, even zero, the MRB&B Project represents a bad investment for Mobile & Baldwin Counties, the State of Alabama, the region and the Nation.

In August 2019, the Eastern Shore Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) voted to remove the Mobile River Bridge & Bayway Project from its Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP), effectively blocking federal funding for the project. The impetus for that vote was the product of public opposition to a proposed $3 to $6 one way toll to finance a project with a need that was never clearly established. The Facebook Block the Mobile Bayway Toll Group mobilized public opposition and made it clear to local elected figures that they were having none of this foolishness.

Now comes a news report detailing how ALDOT thinks that a "much cheaper toll" would be ok. These people at ALDOT and local proponents are still not listening.

Weeks before that fateful vote, this blog argued that the toll was never the real problem. The real problem was in the planning, engineering and design of a Taj Mahal bridge and bayway system that's not necessary and would never be economically feasible.

This project's problem isn't the toll. This project's problem is a failure to meet a basic NEPA requirement to evaluate a full range of alternatives. It won't be the tolling pain that kills the project. It will be the NEPA failure.

By now, it should be clear that nowhere in the public process of preparing the necessary NEPA documents is it stated that this project's economic benefits are equal to or greater than its costs.

The Benefit-Cost Ratio is a mathematical expression of a project's worth to taxpayers. A BCR greater than 1-to-1 means that the project will improve our economic well being. A BCR less than 1-to-1 means that the project will harm our economic well being. A toll would only make our state's agony worse.

Until this project's BCR is proven to be greater than 1.0, the statement "the cost of doing nothing is too high" is patently false.

In layman's terms, ALDOT designed and engineered a bridge and bayway system that would have been overbuilt. They failed to acknowledge that there is a level of storm surge damage risk that we are willing to accept. That level of risk is far higher than what ALDOT was asking us to pay for.

From an economics perspective, the project will suck more money from our local and regional economy than it ever could hope to pay for in more businesses, jobs and tax revenue.

ALDOT deliberately withheld information about the project during the public review period.

ALDOT also inadvertently disclosed what would have been the recommended plan had they accepted the fact that they were proposing an unnecessary behemoth of a project. They withheld information they knew we needed and accidentally disclosed information that showed their lack of candor.

Here is my full review of the Environmental Impact Statement for the project.

Here is an Economic Impact Fact Sheet showing that even with a reduced toll, the project is still a proposal for economic disaster.

The project will not go forward under the NEPA document ALDOT attempted to foist off on the public. Try it, and we'll see it aired out in federal court.

Alabama Policy Institute op-ed on the toll bridge misses the point

Earlier this week, an op-ed from Phil Williams, Director of Policy Strategy at the Alabama Policy Institute appeared in Yellowhammer News. In it, Mr. Williams touted the effectiveness of tolls as a conservative-minded approach to solving transportation infrastructure issues in the state of Alabama. Unfortunately, he misses the point.

First, API is a conservative think tank based in Birmingham and says it is "dedicated to influencing public policy in the interest of the preservation of free markets, limited government and strong families." As a founding member of the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" and a strong libertarian-ish conservative, I applaud such contributions to policy debates. We need more common sense in our town halls, state capitals and Washington, DC.

Conservatives should be advocating for fresh, market-driven ideas to solve public policy problems like transportation infrastructure. The solutions can only be market-based, not market-only, because infrastructure projects like bridges and interstate thoroughfares meet all of the economic criteria for the definition of  public goods. Without devolving into a sophomore economics lesson, a "public good" is something of value that is scarce enough for people to be willing to pay for it, but for which traditional free exchange markets do not exist.

There are means of estimating willingness to pay for public goods that come reasonably close to establishing a market-like value for them. When the public good's benefits are weighed favorably with its costs, the transaction occurs and a public need is met in the least inefficient way. It's not perfect, but it works for flood control, environmental stewardship and police & fire protection.

Unfortunately, the proponents of the Mobile River Bridge & Bayway Project failed to competently employ any of the proxy valuation methods, despite spending more than two decades and an estimated $60 million of the taxpayer's money in developing their plan. Indeed, a two-week review of the decision documents offered by the Federal Highway Administration and the Alabama Department of Transportation revealed that proponents and their contractors incompetently or perhaps even fraudulently presented the project as the most economical, least-cost solution to a perceived future congestion problem on the I-10 corridor.

You can read a report of that review by clicking here. You can read a "Fact Sheet" summary of the likeliest economic effects of the proposed project by clicking here.

Mr. Williams writes this in his op-ed:

For the purposes of THIS discussion you can set aside for a minute whether a bridge is necessary. You can also set aside whether or not the original plans for a $2.1 billion bridge were reasonable. No opinion is offered here on those two salient points. What is at issue in the broader scheme is: how can one who claims the mantle of “conservativism” pay for regional infrastructure? There are very few options. To be sure, bridges cost money. There is no free lunch and there is no free concrete. If the existing revenue does not match the existing need then the only options are to raise revenue through taxes on all, or tolls on some. Throughout this whole melee it was interesting to hear public officials and well-meaning citizens rebuke the idea of a toll as somehow being a violation of conservative principles.

Here’s a news flash: research by the Alabama Policy Institute clearly indicates that one of the most conservative approaches to funding regional infrastructure is what is often referred to as “a user pays system,” or more commonly “a toll.”

It's not possible to set aside project need or project scope because exaggeration in those factors were responsible for the price tag we ultimately rejected. But it wasn't just the price tag.

Here's another news flash: South Alabama motorists and their interstate brothers and sisters can smell a boondoggle coming before it even crosses the state line. The economic consequences of that bridge project were intuitively obvious. No research was needed. It wasn't that a toll violated some innate sense of right and wrong. It was the fact that an exorbitant toll was to be put in place for a minimum of 50 years along with no-compete provisions that would have eventually forced near-term future motorists to use a very costly bridge & bayway system that was loaded with unnecessary extravagance. That project wasn't needed to meet the expected transportation needs or address the expected annual risk of storm surge damage. That project was an over-engineered and over-priced debacle that would have resulted in economic disaster for the region and the state. But it would have guaranteed a tidy return on investment for the monopoly private sector concessionaire. That cannot possibly comport with any notion of conservative principles.

Mr. Williams is engaged in a battle to the death with a strawman. No one is arguing that a toll bridge isn't an effective way of financing a needed project. Projects with an easily identified need have economic benefits that are just as easily identified. A toll is simply a means of monetizing that benefit for the purpose of financing it. We are arguing that this project was demonstrably incapable of producing a monetized benefit that was worth its cost. And in this case, we simply did what rational, free market-minded people should do when confronted with such a choice. We walked away from the transaction.

In other words Mr. Williams, the market worked.

What Mr. Williams may not realize is that the Block the Mobile Bayway Toll Facebook Group counts among its membership a formidable array of talent and experience that is more than capable of addressing the shortcomings of the ALDOT/FHWY plan. There are scientists, engineers, (raises hand) economists, transportation experts, attorneys and policy wonks that might be willing to assist the open-minded in Montgomery in developing a plan that the market-minded folks around here can buy. Perhaps API would be willing to engage with and make use of that talent and advance the cause of influencing public policy "in the interest of the preservation of free markets, limited government and strong families."

Was Toll Road interoperability partly behind Alabama's push to get the Toll Bridge built?

The communities in Mobile and Baldwin Counties may have a little something extra to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

This story was posted on MyNBC15.com, but it's from WPMI's parent company, Sinclair Broadcast Group. It brings to light a previously unknown (to us) obscure provision in the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, aka, MAP-21. This is the federal law that also contained the obscure provision requiring FHWA and its non-federal partners to get local approval for all federally funded highway projects through their Metropolitan Planning Organizations. Those MPOs were the two boards that soundly rejected the Mobile River Bridge & Bayway Project in August, after the grassroots Block the Mobile Bayway Toll Group on Facebook mobilized its forces and made clear that the local electorate was having none of it.

The project was fatally flawed and faced years of litigation even if it survived the Facebook Group's MPO broadside, but the group prevailed and Alabama Governor Kay Ivey pulled the plug and declared it dead.

With this story, we learn that MAP-21 also required tolled roads to be interoperable, so that drivers who purchased electronic pass systems could use toll roads in other states without having to register their vehicle or electronic gadget in each state. It's for our convenience, of course:

Congress hoped to have all tolls systems interoperable by 2016 and the good news is we’re close.

“Ninety-five percent of toll transactions are already interoperable,” said Pat Jones, CEO of the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association, or IBTTA.

He said the problem with not meeting that 2016 deadline set by Congress is that there was no direction attached to that deadline.

“They said this should happen, they didn’t say who should do it, they didn’t say how it’s going to be paid for,” said Jones. “They simply said this needs to happen.”

Thank goodness for small favors. It's one thing for Congress to require states to meet certain requirements as a condition for accepting federal money. They call that... dare I say it? A quid pro quo.

It's quite another thing if along the way, Congress or the agencies it funds make it easier for certain concessionaire enterprises to share the revenues from the tolled roads they manage with all of the states they operate in. Thinking big-picture and connecting dots (with no evidence), is it hard to imagine deals where part of the tolls paid by Alabama drivers traveling in Texas, Florida and Georgia get shared with the home state? You know... so Alabama can pass along a bit of their take with concessionaire partners in Texas, Florida and Georgia when their drivers use Alabama toll roads (and bridges). They kinda already do this sort of thing with Powerball Lottery drawings, don't they?

Thank God we don't ever have to worry about what coulda happened, because it ain't gonna.

Governor Kay Ivey still doesn't understand how the "NO TOLLS" thingie works

In remarks made Wednesday at an event celebrating the distribution of oil and gas royalty money, Governor Kay Ivey tried to blame "the local folks" for her decision to kill off the Mobile River Bridge & Bayway Project.

"Until they allow that project to even be considered in their project list, we can't even ask for federal funds or spend what we thought we had. So until the local folks come together and find a way to be included, this project is dead," said Ivey.

She still doesn't understand how this all went down. That project will not ever be considered, and the "local folks" can show you a little somethin' about being included.

To recap: The state proposed to build a state-of-the art architectural wonder to add a new route across the Mobile River and Delta. It was to relieve congestion, which is bad here, but not strangling like bottlenecks in Houston, Baton Rouge and Birmingham. It was to consist of a high rise bridge over the river and a complete replacement of the existing Bayway.

The price tag was a whopping $2.1 billion--twice the previous estimate. Worse, the state also proposed to fund this monster through a $6 one-way toll. The project was hopelessly infeasible and everyone knew it.

Local residents did indeed object to "that project," and made it clear that it was unacceptable. When their early, disorganized objections were met with an attitude of cool obstinance from the Governor and ALDOT, the public joined forces via social media. State Auditor Jim Ziegler and a handful of his fellow toll fighters formed the Block the Mobile Bayway Toll Group on Facebook and invited the public to join. Within three months, the group membership had reached 50,000 members and the group's message of "NO TOLLS!" could no longer be ignored. Bumper stickers. T-shirts. Peaceful demonstrations. Coordinated messages on local talk radio and across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Grassroots politics in its purest form.

It's worth noting that citizens were never unanimous in opposition to a new bridge or new bridge plus Bayway modernization plan. Most understood that a new route across the river and delta would be needed sometime in the un-distant future. It was the toll plan that caused the uproar (see 'Tolling for the Mobile River Bridge is a symptom, not the problem'). The local economy was at risk of suffering permanent hardship and any Gulf Coastian with a family budget could smell it.

There were other plans that should have been considered; plans that weren't calling for a Taj Mahal structure that could have been feasible. The state never told the whole truth on why such a mega-project was the only and best solution, and this lack of willingness to consider public opinion stuck in the people's craw.

Tone deaf ALDOT tried unsuccessfully to reestablish control of the narrative with pointless press releases, strawman "fact checks" and bold statements of "No tolls? No bridge!" A contentious meeting between local elected officials and ALDOT representatives and consultants ended poorly when ALDOT Director John Cooper stormed away from the dais with the now famous smart-assed comment: "You've caught it; hope you can skin it."

They weren't budging. Governor Ivey and ALDOT were going forward with the project as proposed--tolls and all. Confident that they wouldn't be stopped, they finalized the environmental clearances and began the preliminary processes to move towards construction.

That's when the Facebook group found and adroitly used the obscure provision in an obscure federal law that required local approval of the project in both their short and long range transportation plans. That approval was first tabled by the Mobile County side of the bay and then blocked completely on the Baldwin County side a week later. No local approval meant no federal funding, which meant the project could not move forward at all.

The night of the Baldwin County vote, Governor Ivey released a statement declaring the project "dead." 

The "local folks" simply blew a whistle to stop the toll bridge. That project will stay stopped. That one is dead. What about the other alternatives, like the 50-year retrofit?

To this day, members of the Block the Mobile Bayway Toll group and the local elected officials are open to alternatives for a new route between Mobile and Baldwin County. But based on Governor Ivey's comments Wednesday, the state remains unwilling to discuss toll-free alternatives. Like the 50-year retrofit. Oh, well.

That's how this works--come up with a plan that solves the congestion problem with no tolls. The Metropolitan Planning Organizations will review it, and we'll talk. We'll talk a lot, and you'll listen. A lot. Or...

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Lagniappe story shows that the Block the Mobile Bayway Facebook group stopped a disaster

It's fitting that this nightmare story showed up in time for Halloween. It describes the hellish situation unsuspecting drivers found themselves in after choosing the "convenience" of toll-by-plate over the stop-and-pay lanes on the Foley Beach Express. It's scary stuff, y'all.

Stop now, and say a little prayer of thanks for the Block the Mobile Bayway Facebook Group. Without that group's efforts, the over-designed, ill-conceived and economically disastrous Mobile River Bridge & Bayway would be on its way to construction as you read this post.  Then, this madness would have become real in the near future for as many as 75,000 of you and your fellow citizens:

About 10 times he actually used the service, rolling through without stopping to pay. He said he mainly used it when he was taking his mother to the doctor, and rather than wait in line, he’d use the toll-by-plate lane. He waited and waited for a bill. When several bills finally arrived, they said he owed $365.

“I hadn’t seen a bill in so long I finally said to hell with it,” Coe said. “It was June when I used the toll. I called them in July and they said they still had nothing. I thought, ‘they’ll send me a bill sometime.’ The first notification I got was September and it told me I owed a bill, then another bill, then another bill and then another bill.”

He’s a little leery about ever using the service again.

The story is behind Lagniappe paywall, but it's free in the analog print version.

Let's put this is perspective. The Foley Beach Express carries a small fraction of the traffic that the I-10 corridor carries across the Mobile River and Bay. The driver featured in the Lagniappe story waited three months for the gears of the Alabama state bureaucracy to churn-n-burn out a bill that came out to almost $40 per trip.

The MRB&B project was planning to move forward without a stop-and-pay option. In a "feature" touted by ALDOT as a benefit of its advanced concept and design, drivers would either pay via toll-by-plate or opt for installing a state-issued electronic transponder in your vehicle. "High tech extortion" is not too harsh a term for it.

Imagine the upheaval of having tens of thousands of stories just like the one in the Lagniappe piece. Imagine the Alabama Motor Vehicle Division being deluged by the toll bridge concessionaire with thousands of tag numbers every day of every week of every month. Then the concessionaire maybe, maybe not getting bills mailed out to the registered owners on time.

The Foley driver had to wait three months to get his bill. Would anyone like to take a stab at the over/under on the number of days between toll trip and toll bill for the average commuter on the MRB&B? If that's not scary enough for you imagine what the bill would be with a month's worth of commuting compounded by escalating and punitive "administrative fees" piled on top?

What if you can't pay it? What if the state suspends your license and registration? What if you lose your job because your car was impounded? Or what if your employer closes shop and moves away because of the economic burden of an infeasible boondoggle?

Would ALDOT start putting people in jail for not paying their tolls? What a monster...

Thankfully, the MRB&B project is dead, Dead, DEAD. No chance of Freddy (Cooper?) Kreuger coming back from the grave and restarting that reign of terror.

If anyone asks, "what happened to the toll bridge?" You tell them, "the Facebook Group got it killed."

The Facebook Group worked together in textbook grassroots fashion and stopped the hellish scenario from becoming a reality. The group was started by Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler and a handful of stalwart citizens using their personal accounts on Facebook.  It grew. It worked together. The group beat the odds and got the project killed using an obscure policy provision that no one else even knew existed.

ALDOT and powerful special interests could do nothing but watch helplessly as two boards of local elected officials obliterated a $2.1 billion boondoggle.

Defeating the project was a remarkable example of ordinary Americans working together to achieve a common goal. That goal was to prevent the Foley Beach Express toll-by-plate ordeal from becoming a nightmare for Mobile and Baldwin Counties.

No Tolls amendment in Alabama is a real thing, and Montgomery ignores it at its gravest peril

South Alabama businessman Dean Young is serious about making sure that arbitrary toll road projects are history in this state. He's published a draft of a proposed amendment to the state constitution and he's made sure every member of the Legislature and all constitutional officers of the state have a copy of it.

“It gives the people a voice to say yes we want a toll or no we don’t want a toll, you’ve seen 79% of the people don’t want a toll so they will have a voice,” said Dean Young. Without vigilance on this issue, toll opponents worry tolls could pop up in other projects in the future.

“We’ve seen Prichard try to start a toll road,” said Young. “This is a systemic problem all over the state of Alabama.”

Young says he sent the amendment to lawmakers, most via certified mail, with questionnaires asking if they’d sponsor the amendment and if they’d vote for it. Young says the deadline for responses from legislators is October 18th.

Read his draft amendment here (PDF).

Dean was a part of the grassroots effort to defeat the Mobile River Bridge & Bayway project, which would have put a new high-rise bridge and new elevated Bayway between Mobile and Baldwin Counties. A toll of up to $12 round trip was part of the deal since proponents claimed that a toll was the only feasible means of paying for it.

At the vanguard of the effort to defeat the proposal was the Block the Mobile Bayway Facebook group, which still has 55,000 members. Founded by Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler, the group gave rise to the voices of people who felt their opposition to the project was not being heard or being taken seriously.

Members of that group worked together and found an obscure provision in an obscure federal law. The group then used their nearly unanimous voice to convince local elected officials to use that law to carry out popular will. When the group was through, Governor Kay Ivey pronounced the project "dead" and media observers and the political elite struggled to make sense of what had happened.

Their unvoiced questions: "Why did this unruly, ungrateful bunch of simpletons wreck our $2.1 billion dream?  Don't they know that we know what's best?"

Montgomery may choose to ignore the "No Tolls" movement. The Legislature may see the demise of the massive bridge project as a fluke. If they do and they don't take the movement seriously, the consequences could be severe.

John Fund at the National Review has an excellent essay on the peril faced by those who view the opinion of the people they represent less than seriously. Read the whole thing and see if you don't find some striking similarities between the events of 2016 and what happened here in the Summer of 2019.

The Block the Toll group mushroomed from a handful of to 55,000 in only three months. Like the populist movements in the U.K. and U.S. in 2016-17, the group includes a broad cross-section of voters. The group defies political stereotypes and cuts across every line political scientists use to define an electorate. There's no dominant racial, religious, age, ideology or class. Rich, poor, young, old, urban, rural... they're all represented.

Could a group like this come together and agree on a course of action, and then resolutely move a state to change the way it governs itself? Well, the Block the Toll Group has already stopped a Governor, a powerful state agency and some well-connected P3s from ramming a project through. Now, the group seeks have the Legislature put an amendment before the voters.

Getting that done will certainly see the group grow even more.  Perhaps it could even mushroom again--from a diverse 55,000 to an equally diverse 255,000 or 1,255,000.

The Governor and ALDOT learned that the more you fight popular will, the stronger it grows. The political elite in Europe and Washington, DC learned that, too.

Here's to wonderin' if the lessons stuck.

Final Nail: Eastern Shore officials vote to formally kill the Mobile River Bridge & Bayway project

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey declared the toll bridge project "dead" right after the August 28, 2019 Eastern Shore Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) adopted a resolution pledging to remove it.

The MPO made it official today:

The last bureaucratic hurdle toward killing off the state’s $2.1 billion Interstate 10 Mobile River Bridge and Bayway project was cleared Wednesday with little fanfare.

Elected officials in Baldwin County, however, expressed “cautious optimism” about what might come next in exploring alternative ways of alleviating predicted gridlock on I-10.

With voice approval, the Eastern Shore Metropolitan Planning Commission adopted its fiscal year 2020-23 Transportation Improvement Plan, or TIP. The plan is a crucial document that details transportation priorities for the next four years.

 Although the Governor's declaration made the project a political improbability, the project was actually in a technical stasis. The Federal Highway Administration was the lead agency for the conduct and  submission of the  project's Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. 

That environmental document and its Record of Decision (ROD) was finalized on August 16. On August 30, FHWA quietly filed a final notice formally ending the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) process and starting a mandatory time limit on litigation related to the agency's decision to move forward.

Alabama had declared it dead. Washington still had boxes to check.

Today's formal vote to remove the project from its TIP also formally removed it from being considered for federal funding. It went from technical stasis to both politically and technically dead. It is now dead, Dead, DEAD.

If this all sounds a little confusing, don't be alarmed.

In order for a federal project to move to construction, it has to be approved by the lead federal agency and it has to be eligible for federal funding. A project that gets approved is only halfway there. The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, or MAP-21, requires local political control over the projects that are planned for their area. If it doesn't get that local support, the project can't be funded so it can't be built, approved or not.

ALDOT and FWHA got approval ahead of funding in their project schedule. Funding authorization required public involvement just like the EIS did. Had they gotten inclusion in the TIP done before completing the environmental documentation, we would certainly be in a different mode right now.

It was the work of the Block the Mobile Bayway Toll group on Facebook that made this happen, folks. The Group proved that We the People are smarter than their alleged betters gave them credit for. The People uncovered obscure provisions in an obscure law. They followed the advice of group members with expertise in said law, contacted the right people, made the right requests (LOUDLY), and coaxed their local elected representatives to smack ALDOT right upside its wobbly head.

Well done, y'all.

Mobile Harbor Dredging Project gets nod, providing good news for the area's economy

It's official: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has final go ahead to deepen and widen critical navigational choke-points along the Mobile Ship Channel. The Corps announced it yesterday:

The Corps announced Monday that Maj. Gen. Diana Holland, Commander of the South Atlantic Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, had signed the Record of Decision for the Mobile Harbor General Reevaluation Report (GRR) with Integrated Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS).

The GRR/SEIS presents a project that is estimated to cost $387.8 million dollars; Judith Adams, the Alabama State Port Authority’s vice president for marketing, said that may not include several million dollars of incidental costs for things such as relocation of navigational aids. The plan calls for easing some bends, creating a wide section to serve as a passing zone, extending a turning basin and deepening the channel by 5 feet to a nominal depth of 50 feet. Altogether, that work will involve moving 24 million cubic yards of material.

The lion’s share of the project, roughly three-quarters, will be paid for with federal funds. A bond issue expended to be in the range of $150 million will pay for the state’s portion of the project, Adams, said. That bond issue, in turn, will be paid off with an earmarked portion of the state gas tax increase approved earlier this year.

The project has a whopping 3.1 Benefit-to-Cost Ratio, meaning that the approximately $400 million project is expected to produce about $1.2 billion in economic benefits in National Economic Development terms. In local, state and regional terms the beneficial impact is even greater. The IBCR Analytics' ROME Model predicts a 1.3 to 1.5 multiplier, meaning that the project is expected to produce about $1.7 billion over its 50-year project life.

The project is not without legitimate controversy. The al.com story linked above mentions the potentially harmful effects on marine life and a potential lost opportunity to aid in the renourishment of sand-starved Dauphin Island. The Sand Island Beneficial Use Area (SIBUA) dredge material disposal site is expected to help in this regard, but until Congress acts the Corps is both limited by both federal statute and its own regulations to use the least cost disposal method that reasonably considers other methods (See Engineering Regulation 1105-2-100).

The Harbor Project is a fine example of how to conduct a public infrastructure investment study. In approximately five years and for the tidy sum of about $8 million, The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Alabama State Port Authority took this project from concept to conclusion. Transparently. The Corps even agreed to extend the public comment period twice to allow the public to ask  questions, provide additional input and understand the project.

Compare this to the 22-year, $60 million effort that produced an over-sized, over-engineered and over-priced Mobile River Bridge and Bayway project that went down in flames last month. The Harbor Project will produce an estimated $1.7 billion in economic development. The bridge project had a net negative estimated impact and would have sucked all of that benefit away.

Officials refused my repeated and public requests for deadline extension and never addressed any of the public concerns over the feasibility of the project. No wonder it failed so spectacularly.

ALDOT and the Federal Highway Administration need to have a sit-down with USACE and ASPA and get a clue on how to get schtuff done.

The project has also gotten the attention of a few wild-eyed conspiracy theorists. These poor souls are surprising a few people and embarrassing a lot more by airing suspicions of a plan to effect a foreign takeover of the Port of Mobile. The nefarious plan was to have crooked politicos let mysterious foreign companies buy up all the the port facilities and detonate or otherwise destroy the George C. Wallace Tunnel on I-10 and the Bankhead Tunnel on US-90/98 through downtown Mobile. This would let the terrorists, the Russians, the Chinese (or all of them) deftly move in with their secret super ships and take over America, or something.

This of course, was all going to be paid for with the tolls on a new high rise bridge over the Mobile River and a new Bayway over the Delta and that's what the proposed toll was all about, you see. Why else would they need such a big bridge? Why else a new Bayway? You can't get those secret super ships in the port if the bridge and the Bayway are too short, right? Right! And the tunnels have to go because they're too shallow for the secret super ships. It all makes perfect sense to anyone with their foil hats aligned properly.

Finally, with all good conspiracy yarns come the belief that anyone offering contrary evidence must be in on the deal. Denying that there is a plan is itself evidence that there is a plan, you see.

As the old saying goes, "a lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth even gets her boots on."

Federal Highway Administration quietly files Final Notice in the Federal Register

See update below.

The Federal Highway Administration has quietly filed its Final Notice in the Federal Register, ending the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) documentation and starting a mandatory time limit on litigation related to the agency's decision to move forward with the Mobile River Bridge & Bayway Project.

The $2.1 billion plan to create a new route across the Mobile River and expand the Bayway hit a practical and financial barrier to construction earlier this month when local government officials voted nearly unanimously to remove it from their Transportation Improvement Plans (TIPs). Those votes made the plan ineligible for federal funding, effectively ending any realistic chance of building the deeply unpopular project.

From a NEPA perspective however, the project is not dead. Its status is better described as in stasis. It is a project that is approved, but according to the MAP-21 Act, cannot be built. Yet.

SUMMARY:

This notice announces actions taken by the FHWA that are final. The action relates to the proposed project to increase the capacity of Interstate Route 10 (I-10) by constructing a new six-lane bridge across the Mobile River and replacing the existing four-lane I-10 bridges across Mobile Bay with eight lanes above the 100-year storm elevation. The proposed project is located in Mobile and Baldwin Counties, Alabama. Those actions grant approvals for the project.

DATES:

By this notice, the FHWA is advising the public of final agency actions subject to 23 U.S.C. 139(l)(1). A claim seeking judicial review of the Federal agency actions on the project will be barred unless the claim is filed on or before January 27, 2020. If the Federal law that authorizes judicial review of a claim provides a time period of less than 150 days for filing such claim, then that shorter time period still applies.

So what does this mean for the project's opponents?

It means that if opponents have a cause to challenge FHWA's determination that the NEPA process for moving ahead with project has been satisfied, now is the time to make it official and begin your litigation process. File your notice, file your suit, whatever legal counsel tells you to do.

Please note the last sentence in the quoted text above. It says that if a shorter clock exists, that shorter clock applies. In keeping with FHWA and ALDOT practice with this project, they ain't saying if a shorter clock exists or when it might run out. As usual, dear peasant public person, it's on you to figure it out.

What could go wrong? The two MPO's could have a change of heart after the litigation clock runs out and put the project back in their TIPs. The state could then put it back in their STIP, and the public would have no legal recourse to stop it.

This blog has always maintained that NEPA was the project's greatest weakness.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the amount of information available on the project website's documents section at www.mobileriverbridge.com has been greatly abbreviated.

Update: A friend of the blog advises me that taking this step just covers FHWA from trouble for not completing the process. She also surmises that talks between FHWA, ALDOT and local officials could produce an alternative that satisfies the local "red line" of no tolls. This filing removes the chance that the new alternative falls afoul of NEPA procedure. Fair enough.

Could such discussions be underway? I won't speculate.

Update II: The old www.mobileriverbridge.com site's documents section is back.

Media: "What the heck's an MPO?" Block the Mobile Bayway Toll Group: "Hey y'all! Watch this!"

"We the People" are smarter than you gave them credit for, aren't they Madam Governor?

In what some observers might term an upset victory, a 55,000 strong group of unruly, unsophisticated simpletons struck a mortal blow to the $2.1 billion Mobile River Bridge & Bayway Project.  The Block the Mobile Bayway Facebook Group suited up, showed up and spoke up and local officials exercised the will of the electorate.

The group did this by uncovering an obscure provision in a 7-year old federal law.

The MPO and the TIP are the creations of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, or MAP-21 for short. MAP-21 was the brainchild of former U.S. Representative John Mica (R-FL), who was Chairman of the House Transportation Committee. MAP-21 sailed through both houses of Congress and was signed by President Barack Obama on July 6, 2012.

MAP-21 profoundly changed how the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration works with state highway departments and--importantly in this case--gave broad new powers to local elected officials. Local mayors and council members were given almost total control over the size, scope and impact of federally funded transportation projects in their districts.  Succinctly, if the locals want a project proposed by the state and federal highway folks, they allow it and it goes into the community's TIP. The state then puts that TIP into their State TIP (STIP) and that goes to the feds.

If a project doesn't go into the TIP, it can't go in the STIP, and the state can't get federal funding for the project. Neat, huh?

No one in the print, broadcast or online media had a clue about MAP-21, MPOs or TIPs. Federal officials ostensibly knew what these acronyms meant. ALDOT certainly did, but since that bunch has a nasty habit of not volunteering information that might hurt them, they said nothing.

The grassroots group discovered it, though. The group also discovered that projects critical to the Bridge & Bayway weren't included in the TIPs yet, and that they could be excluded from the TIPs by the MPOs.  They mobilized their forces, explained the potential impacts of the obscure federal law provisions to their local elected officials and inundated them with requests for action. The officials listened to the concerns of their constituents and followed their suggestions.

The Mobile Metropolitan Planning Organization (MMPO) met first on August 21, 2019. The Eastern Shore MPO (ESMPO) met a week later on August 28. The purpose of these meetings was to approve the Transportation Improvement Plans (TIP) for Mobile and Baldwin County, which among other things included a list of projects the MPOs wished to approve so that the projects in their plan could accept federal funding. Both MPOs voted overwhelmingly to remove all projects related to the Bridge & Bayway and that was that.

When they were through, the Bridge & Bayway project was pronounced dead by Governor Kay Ivey and everyone from the ALDOT War Room to the local media joint's News Room asked, "what the heck did we just watch?"

There is a delicious bit of irony in how this all shook out. To the bitter end, ALDOT was sticking to a claim that federal law required that the existing Bayway had to be replaced. The whole time they were defending this position, local officials, the media and even your beloved IBCR Blogger was asking, "where's the federal law?" Sadly, some people were beginning to accept the inevitability of a $2.1 billion behemoth they didn't want.

It wasn't until near the very end of this process did the ALDOT "federal law!" facade begin to tremble.

Then, out of nowhere an honest-to-goodness real federal law was found, and the Block the Mobile Bayway Group used it masterfully and saw ALDOT and the Governor hoisted with their own petard. 

"Hey, y'all! Watch this!"

Boom, baby. 

ALDOT withheld critical information during public review and AFTER the Record of Decision.

Monday night's publication of the Alabama Department of Transportation's reasoning for recommending replacement of the Bayway (PDF) as part of the Mobile River Bridge & Bayway Project came AFTER the Record of Decision (ROD) was signed on August 15, 2019.

It came AFTER the ROD was announced in the Federal Register.

ALDOT claimed in its "Media Response and Project Information – Bayway Height" that:

To comply with Federal regulations, ALDOT determined replacing the Bayway above the 100-year storm surge elevation is in the best interest for the safety of traveling public and is the most cost-effective solution.

As we saw yesterday, this is certainly not the most cost-effective solution. That solution is widening and retrofitting the existing Bayway and providing for its complete replacement 40 years from now (or whenever construction is complete).

The Bayway Alternatives Analysis Matrix that was released with the Media Response fails to reflect the discounted present value of future replacement and is based on the ridiculous assumption that widening and retrofitting the Bayway will not extend its useful life.

The key takeaway is not that the August 26 documents are incorrect. It's that ALDOT didn't release them until the ROD was signed and delivered, an action which completes the NEPA process for the project.

If this information had been known prior to the publication of the Final SEIS and the ROD, members of the public, the news media and local elected officials could have done something with it.

Instead, ALDOT held a number of listening sessions and meetings with local officials. They never told those officials what the regulations really said. They never shared an alternatives analysis matrix. They never told anybody that a structure built to the 50-year standard was not only permissible, but cost-effective.

You can't use critical information you aren't told about.

Instead, Governor Kay Ivey blasted every media outlet in the state with a rambling op-ed, and called opponents' statements "misinformation."

It's not like this information wasn't asked for, either. Click (or tap) the image below:

What this silence tells me is that ALDOT had this information. ALDOT knew this information could change the course of public discussion of the project. ALDOT knew this information might then cause the agency to reevaluate alternative plans.

And ALDOT held this information until after the NEPA process was complete.

I repeatedly asked ALDOT to delay the NEPA process and re-open or extend public review and they repeatedly refused to do so. 

I leave it to my readers to speculate on the reason why.

ALDOT shreds remaining credibility, now says elevating the Bayway is... the least cost option?

ALDOT has been lying to us all along. There was never a federal requirement to elevate the Bayway to withstand the 100-year tropical storm surge with 100-year sea level rise.

ALDOT Director John Cooper told NBC 15 that federal law required elevation above the 100-year in July. He repeated the statement to Fox 10. The project manager for this boondoggle said it to WKRG.

(Extra Point: Go here to see how many different ways Cooper has tried selling this story.)

Governor Kay Ivey told every media outlet in the state that it was the truth.

ALDOT was asked repeatedly by members of the public, local elected officials and even your beloved blogger what specific federal law or regulation stated "thou shalt not build below the 100-year event." We never got a straight answer.

We now know that the requirement was a whole cloth fabrication.

Brazenly, the agency now says (PDF) that elevating the Bayway to their imaginary 100-year standard is the least cost option!

Making inaccurate statements because of a mistake or incomplete information is one thing. Making false statements knowing they are not true is lying.

How are we to believe that the cost estimates provided in the link above are accurate? They've been lying to us for months and now we can trust them?

How stupid do they think we are?

If you thought the peasants in the Block to Mobile Bayway Toll Facebook Group were revolting before this, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Even if we were to take the cost estimates at face value, the notion that they demonstrate replacement to be the least cost option is wrong because ALDOT still doesn't understand the time value of money concept.

Economics 201, y'all (click or tap the image for larger scale).

The table above comes from ALDOT's PDF, wherein the agency claim that the widened and retrofitted Bayway will have to be replaced 20 years after the upgrade because it will have reached the end of it's useful life.

The top two lines are for upgrading the structure. The bottom two are for replacement. There are calculations shown for building to the 50-year event and the 100-year event.

This new argument has more than one problem.

1. The process of widening & retrofitting the Bayway will absolutely extend the structure's useful life, making the contention that it needs to be replaced in a mere 20 years highly questionable.
2. Even so, a cost anticipated 20 years into the future must be discounted to present day dollars. At 2.5% interest and a 20-year term, the cost to replace the upgraded Bayway is $397 million, not $651 million as shown for the 50-year option. The 100-year option's discounted replacement cost is $543 million, not $890.
3. If the useful life of the Bayway is extended to 40 years by the widening & retrofit work, then the discounted replacement cost is $242 million for the 50-year option. This makes the 50-year retrofit the least cost option at $770 million total.
4. The difference in cost between Bayway widening & retrofitting today and replacing sometime in the future is... interesting. Why does it cost more to widen and retrofit today than it does to replace that same structure tomorrow? If a brand new widened & retrofitted 50-year Bayway costs only $651 million, we'll take one today in Coral Pink with the Key Lime highlights.

The most likely answer to No. 4 is that these numbers are completely bogus, just like everything else ALDOT has been telling us about this project. They're probably made up to fit the narrative they're selling today.

Tomorrow, Baldwin County's Metropolitan Planning Organization has an opportunity to tell ALDOT how they feel about being lied to.

ed note: This post is subject to revision. Please let me know about any problems at BridgeReview@ibleedcrimsonred. com. I will try to be prompt. 

Plus, there are several other items of interest in ALDOT'S new story that need to be addressed, which will be covered in a future post. 

BOOM: Federal official tells Fox10 that there is no federal requirement to elevate the Bayway to 100-year protection

ALDOT has been stubbornly consistent that as part of the proposed Mobile River Bridge & Bayway Project, raising the Bayway is required by Federal Law. Not so, says an unnamed federal official to Fox 10's Tyler Fingert.

My question is: How long did they think this charade would last?

Two things need to be digested here.

One, while we have no good reason to doubt the veracity of Fox 10's reporting, it's an unnamed source. We don't know the agency the official works for, or where he is on the agency's food chain. Typically, unnamed sources dine on the lower end because they're at risk of retaliation from higher ups. That doesn't mean he doesn't know policy. Just that he (she?) probably doesn't make policy.

Two, Fingert says the source tells him that "ALDOT is using other specifications to address risk which is acceptable to the federal government." So, it's not required to meet government standards, but since it does, we're good?

Umm, no. We can't afford Taj Majal projects anymore.

The failure to properly address risk has been one of my chief complaints about the plan to replace the perfectly functioning Bayway. The coastal engineering team did an acceptable job of finishing half of a coastal storm damage risk analysis. All they did was tell us what we already knew: that the Bayway is vulnerable to really bad storms.

About two weeks ago, I wrote the following in this space:

[The] plan calls for the new structure to be elevated and built to "withstand the 100-year design storm including the 100-year sea-level rise." (SDEIS Vol I, p. 32)  In layman's terms, this is a structure built to hold up in a hurricane with a 1% chance of occurring in any year and driving a water level that is only going to occur sometime between now and 100 years into the future. (Assuming of course that one accepts the United Nations' climate change projections.)

...

This was the only alternative that was modeled by ALDOT's coastal engineering team. There were no other alternatives considered. In fact, Appendix G (SDEIS Vol II) didn't model the existing Bayway to determine what combination of storm surge and sea level rise would cause enough damage to it to render the expected risk unacceptable. That is, we don't know the expected annual risk of leaving the existing Bayway as it is. So how can we know whether the expected annual risk of the proposed structure is acceptable?

Why shouldn't we demand it be built to a standard that survives the 200- or 500-year storm with 200- or 500-year sea level rise?  Why is the 50-/50- standard not acceptable?

For that matter, will a modified, storm-armored and expanded 6-lane Bayway reduce expected annual risk enough to be economically feasible? Economically feasible without a toll, perhaps?

Emphasis is mine.

There are less costly alternatives that have not been evaluated. There is a level of storm surge vulnerability that we are willing to accept.

With the public revelation that the old deterministic method of establishing risk isn't actually a federal mandate, we may finally see a new probabilistic process that clearly communicates risk and allows those who pay for it decide how much risk we're willing to accept.

UPDATED: Governor Ivey and bridge proponents suffer major setback as Transportation Tax Project is put on hold

See update below.

Make no mistake about it--Wednesday's unanimous vote to table all items related to construction of ALDOT's Transportation Tax Scheme represents a major setback.

The vote by the Mobile Metropolitan Planning Organization to approve the whole Transportation Improvement plan was quietly expected to sail through a process mandated by a federal law known as MAP-21. Succinctly, MAP-21 requires federal spending to be approved by a local transportation planning group, in this case the South Alabama Regional Planning Commission's MPO.

However, the Facebook Group Block the Mobile Bayway Toll got wind of the gravity of Wednesday's decision and quickly swung into action. MPO members (almost all of whom are locally elected officials) were deluged with comments and fervent requests to either table or remove the specific projects related to the Transportation Tax Scheme.

The MPO carefully and openly considered the merits of the public's concerns and called timeout.

The items tabled today will be held in abeyance until after Alabama Toll Road, Bridge, and Tunnel Authority holds a special meeting on October 7, 2019. ALDOT may not receive or spend any funds on the tabled items until they're approved.

First, this is a setback because this delay likely wrecks ALDOT's schedule. The three private sector contractors cannot submit their final proposals until all clearances have been received. ALDOT had planned to receive those proposals by the end of the calendar year and award a contract in early 2020. That looks unlikely.

Second, this delay also gives creative minds about six weeks to come up with different design and funding concepts for the project. It also gives ALDOT time to conduct at least a cursory coastal storm surge risk analysis on the Bayway modification vs replacement controversy.

This will force project planners to reconsider their alternatives analysis and that in turn has a likelihood of resulting in at least an addendum to the environmental documents approved on August 16. This is another schedule wrecker.

Further, this gives steadfast and well-funded bridge opponents more time to prepare their complaints and file their lawsuits against the project. Those lawsuits will happen if ALDOT and FHWA try to move this project forward as is.

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So yes, Wednesday's decision was a very big deal.

Update: The implications on the project schedule were made explicit yesterday by ALDOT Director John Cooper. Cooper was in an informational meeting with area elected officials held after the MPO meeting:

ALDOT’s Transportation Director John Cooper says Mobile Metropolitan Planning Organization’s (MPO) decision to table the vote for funding and the Eastern Shore MPO's consideration to remove the project from the transportation improvement plan (TIP) stops them from requesting proposals. It's tricky because he says officials would want a final proposal first before putting it back in the TIP.

"We can't deliver on what you have asked us to do in the position you have put us in," Cooper said. "We can't bring you a final plan without it in the TIP."

Just as I said. The schedule is wrecked.

MOBILE RIVER BRIDGE & BAYWAY PROJECT ECONOMIC IMPACT FACT SHEET

FACT: The $2.1 billion Mobile River Bridge & Bayway Project has a benefit-cost-ratio less than 1-to-1 and will consume far more economic resources than it produces. The No-Build alternative is more favorable.[1]

FACT: In 2019 dollars, the Bridge alone will have a $6.8 million annual negative impact on the Mobile maritime industry. The economic impact to other sectors (tourism, healthcare, construction, retail trade, etc) is unknown.[2]

FACT: The economic value of storm surge risk to both the existing Bayway and the proposed new Bayway is undisclosed and unknown.[3]

FACT: The Traffic & Revenue Study improperly uses arbitrary inflation rates in its forecasts and uses a lower inflation rate for cost growth and a higher inflation rate for revenue growth, producing artificially distorted net revenues.[4]

FACT: The Africatown/Plateau Community and Downtown Mobile will face higher traffic congestion costs and increased accident risk cost from drivers avoiding the MRB&B transportation tax.[5]

FACT: Mobile and Baldwin area law enforcement and judicial administrative systems face unknown burdens and unknown costs in enforcing transportation tax payments.[6]

FACT: The project includes bicycle, pedestrian and other recreational features that serve neither the stated project purpose or need and have no identified methods of paying for themselves.[7]

FACT: A new toll is a de facto tax increase. Enforced tolls and enforced taxes are treated identically by consumers and businesses in the marketplace. Consumers seek to avoid taxes where practical and/or constrain spending elsewhere. Businesses pass the full cost to consumers through price increases and accept the risk of lost sales. The cost of everything increases.

CONCLUSION: The MRB&B Project represents a bad investment for Mobile & Baldwin Counties, the State of Alabama and the Nation.

Read the full report on the project here.

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[1] Draft Environmental Impact Statement, 2014, Table 9, indexed to 2019 dollars using CPI 2012-2019.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Supplemental Draft EIS, 2019, Appendix G.

[4] I‐10 Mobile River Bridge and Bayway – Draft Traffic & Revenue Study Report, May 2018.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Alabama Senate Bill 347.

[7] Final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision, 2019.

Bridge Economics in Alabama

There are three things certain in life: Death, taxes and the determination of people to avoid both.

Yes, this is going to be a snarky post with a little good ol' smart-assery. Hey... this stuff needs to be said and I have the un-buffered medium with which to say it.

Remember: I am not opposed to tolling as a concept for financing projects with the demonstrated economic benefits needed to support it. I am opposed to projects that do not have the economic benefits that the toll seeks to monetize. Ramming infeasible projects through just because you can is a recipe for economic disaster. Bad tax policy has a bad habit of making bad things happen. Duh.

Tolling defenders claim that the toll is not a tax--you can simply use another route to make the trip. This makes about as much sense as saying sales taxes aren't taxes because you can simply choose not to eat. Or not to wear clothes. Or not to use deodorant. Or not take your anti-psychotic medication. You can choose to be hungry, naked, smelly and crazy and go tax free, right? Your choice.

Come on, folks. If the government makes you pay for the privilege of doing something, it's a tax.

From an economics perspective, a tax and a toll evoke the same response in how businesses and consumers behave in the marketplace. For consumers, the cost is a new item in their budget constraint. To the extent feasible the consumer will avoid paying it and will forego buying something else to pay what cannot be avoided. For businesses, the full tax burden will be added to the cost of the goods sold and the owners will absorb the risk of reduced sales as a result.

A toll and a tax are interchangeable in a model of any economy burdened by either.

So, henceforth this space will use the term "tax" when referring to the cost burden of this project. When you correct the terminology you change the narrative.

"Toll" is a four-letter word.

Even famous people avoid taxes. We're not famous here, but we have our ways.

Under current Alabama law, anyone aged 19 and over can buy a car without being required to simultaneously register the vehicle with the state. This is because Alabama law requires car owners to provide proof of liability insurance when registering their vehicle. Not surprisingly, cars are cheap in Alabama and they're easy to obtain. Look around -- $99 sign and drive (SAD) car dealerships are thriving from one end of the state to another. They don't care about your credit and they might not even check to make sure your driver's license is valid.

Those cars will become very popular if the Mobile River Bridge & Bayway project is built as a taxed route. No tag means no tax.

Alabama drivers are also notorious for failing to renew their vehicle registration, and part of that is because they have also failed to renew their liability insurance. For many, paying the first period's insurance premium and defaulting on the plan is part of the SAD game. But the state still has a name and address for that tag, expired or not. That tag promptly disappears.

This will also be a popular choice among commuters in Mobile and Baldwin Counties, especially among lower income folks. These are the people for whom a new $90 monthly tax has crowded the budget constraint.  Do they renew registration and insurance? Do they look for work in a place with no transportation tax? Do they take a look-see at what others are doing to avoid the tax?

We can also reasonably expect the emergence of a black market dealing in fake or stolen license tags and stolen or hacked electronic transponders. Craigslist and similar sites will surely have any of these on offer.

Tough choices will be made by consumers and businesses and none of them will be beneficial to the revenues of the tax collector.

The ALDOT/FHWA team has decreed that the number of invalid tags using their project will amount to about 5%, and that average weekday traffic on the 2030 established and taxed project will be about 70,000 vehicles. Doing some math gives us approximately 3,500 tax violators per weekday.

If we conservatively assume 48 4.5 day work weeks, we could see 756,000 accused tax cheats every year.

Goat Hill has a plan for all these tax cheats. Alabama Senate Bill 347 flew through the 2019 legislative session, giving the state the power to assess administrative fees on unpaid tax violators; to non-renew vehicle registration of vehicles for failure to pay a tax violation and assessed administrative fees; and to further provide reciprocal agreements with other states or jurisdictions that have also pursued the madness of directly taxing drivers.

What percentage of the 756,000 tax cheats will bite the bullet and pay up? Half, maybe?

That leaves the other half as unrepentant tax cheats in the eyes of the pointy heads in Monkeytown. They are coming after you, you rebellious Gulf Coastians.

This is going to be our administrative and judicial nightmare:

• There won't be enough local yokels or state troopers on the road to pull over and either ticket or tow the tax dodgers. 
• There won't be enough room in the impound lots for tax dodging vehicles to be held pending resolution. Towing companies will feast on the carnage.
• Traffic court dockets will be jam packed with transportation tax dodgers. Our municipal and district court systems will have much less docket space for the real public safety threats like DUIs, reckless drivers, scene leavers and drug traffickers. Real bad guys will get away.
• What will be done with the people who are on their third or fourth tax cheat citation? Jail them?
• Vehicle registrations will plummet while $99 SAD auto sales will be steady or climbing.
• There will be thousands more unregistered and uninsured vehicles on our roadways every year. This is a serious threat to the personal and economic well-being of every safe driver on the road.
• People will inevitably lose their cars and will also lose their jobs. Another $99 SAD?
• Traffic on the tax-free route will skyrocket and traffic on the taxed route will drop. 
• The Africatown Community will be swamped with tax-avoiding but otherwise decent and courteous drivers on the tax free route.
• The taxed route operator's revenues will suffer, leading to an inevitable increase in the tax rate. The increased tax rate will then drive even more consumers to either constrain their other spending or (more likely) join the growing hordes of tax cheats.
• The economic output of Mobile and Baldwin Counties will drop. Home prices will fall. Sales tax collections will contract.
• The Alabama Gulf Coast will be less competitive in recruiting new business. Who wants to locate in an area with depressed personal income, slumping housing prices and higher-than-average unemployment?

This has a very good chance to be the economic picture of the Alabama Gulf Coast in about 10 years, if the MRB&B project is built as planned. 

It doesn't have to be this way. If the ALDOT and FHWA team go back to the drawing board, they can develop an economically feasible plan.  That plan would likely follow the lead of the 2014 EIS, which never recommended taxing the plan's users. That plan would also seriously consider the economic effects of hurricane and storm damage risk. Don't hide behind a leeway-laden standards recommendation. Don't fearfully try to design away 100% of the risk posed by an improbable storm event occurring with an unlikely sea level rise. Instead, compute the expected annual risk of a wide array of alternatives and seek the plan that best balances cost with risk reduction benefits.

The only other alternative is the no-build alternative. The people of the Alabama Gulf Coast are used to storms and hurricanes. We're used to the occasional weekday traffic jams on the Bayway. We know better than to try making an optional Bayway trip on check-in days during the summer tourist season. 

We're ok with it as is.