Freeway not needed

Spokane’s traffic congestion barely registers on Washington’s most recent congestion study. According to the Washington State Department of Transportation, Spokane County’s congestion on state highways is less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the statewide total. Its measure of annual delay per person is measured in minutes for Spokane, and 99.75 percent of the state’s traffic congestion occurs elsewhere.

Despite all of the empirical evidence, the Legislature and the WSDOT still insist that we need to finish the North Spokane Corridor, at a final cost of almost $2 billion. Spending billions of dollars to solve legitimate congestion problems in the Puget Sound makes economic sense. Finishing the North Spokane Corridor is pork barrel politics at its worst. We need to bring fiscal responsibility to the decision-making process. The Legislature has cut billions of dollars out of the state’s annual budget since the beginning of the recession.

Kids are going to school hungry; going into packed classrooms with poorly equipped teachers. Criminals are not serving their full sentences because we can’t afford to keep the bad guys behind bars. Yet our leaders still parrot the line that we need to finish a multibillion-dollar project that doesn’t solve a real problem.

John Covert

Spokane