Doug Clark: The Monroe Street ‘Road Diet’ will starve businesses

Buoyed by last summer’s success at nearly destroying downtown shopping through the random digging of giant holes in the pavement, the Spokane City Clowncil is now looking to see if they can wreck the commerce on Monroe Street, too.

The plan, it has been widely reported, is to put a mile-long stretch of North Monroe on what public works officials call a strict “Road Diet.”

This is not to be confused with the strict Atkins Diet that I went on back in 1990s.

For a while, it actually worked. I dropped down to almost the weight I carried in high school by following Dr. Atkins’ orders to eat nothing but beef jerky, steak, raw hamburger and several of the meatier varieties of insects.

“Follow my diet and you’ll live forever,” advised Dr. Atkins to his fans shortly before he dropped dead.

The problem with the Atkins all-protein protocol came when I was about two months into it. I suddenly started jonesing like an opioid addict for what food scientists call carbohydrates.

Or, in layman’s terms: “Everything that tastes good.”

So in a moment of shaky weakness, I strayed off my Atkins regimen and consumed 512 Hostess Twinkies in about 15 minutes.

I felt positively giddy. Until next morning, that is, when I awoke to find that I had ballooned to the approximate size of a Macy’s parade float.

That’s the trouble with these popular exotic diets, there’s always a dark and sinister cost.

The Spokane Road Diet does not involve food, of course.

Well, unless you count all the meals that the taxpayers probably picked up while lawmakers, experts and other nimrods were mulling it over.

Rather, the Road Diet is a sophisticated construction process whereby the city can receive millions in grant dollars from the Karl Marx Institute by promising to squeeze the life out of a capitalist-filled thoroughfare.

The Road Diet will entail many of the same elements that are common to all Spokane street projects: Endless digging, hundreds of orange cones, flashing lights, detours, huge languishing semi-rusted pieces of heavy equipment, night-and-day jackhammering, scoop shoveling and an encampment of 1,200 bright-vested, steely eyed, armed flaggers who have been ordered to shoot to kill.

How long, some of you taxpayers might wonder, will the North Monroe Road Diet take to complete?

Hoping to begin the project next year, city officials have carefully calculated that …

“With normal stalls, delays, excuses, denials, accusations, screw-ups, lawsuits, firings and reprisals, the North Monroe Road Diet should be concluded sometime way, way, way into the future.

“But don’t hold us to that.”

In the end, however, it will all be worth it! Spokane’s once-fatty pants North Monroe will have been successfully squeezed into a Size 1 glamour mag-worthy goat path.

North Monroe Lite, as it will be known, will be transformed into a “destination” dotted with clog repair shops, medical marijuana outlets, espresso bars with clever names like “Bean Me Up, Scotty,” and flocks of socially conscious millennial hipsters shopping for organic kale.

Spokane can then cash in on the nation’s obsession with weight by publishing our own “Road Diet” book for other morbidly obese communities to follow.

Already, however, some of the more selfish merchants are crying foul. They recall previous roadwork nightmares, like when the city took 17 years to upgrade the Monroe Street Bridge and reduced commerce north of the bridge to one guy selling corn dogs from a cart.

Monroe, they argue, is a vital conduit for drivers going from downtown north to Francis and back again. Squeezing it anywhere would make as much sense as choking off a wild raging river.

These merchants fear that the snarl and slowdowns of construction will scare away business and starve their enterprises right into the ground.

To which the city has responded with, “Yeah. What’s your point?”

And the beat goes on in the Lilac City.