OPEN
LETTER
September 17, 2018
Mr. Ty Warner
Executive Director
Northwest Indiana Regional Planning
Commission
VIA
EMAIL
Dear Mr. Warner:
I was surprised to see an invitation to
participate in a survey by NIPRC. It arrived in my home mailbox in Gary.
Frankly, I did not think your organization
was interested in public input. I base this on long experience. First, you
declined an invitation to meet with Everybody Counts (ECCIL), the local Center
for Independent Living, when you first began your job at NIRPC. ECCIL extended
the invitation to you in public, and you rebuked them in front of several
witnesses. Secondly, your organization has never complied with Federal guidance
concerning public input. This was true even when you chose to thumb your nose
at the consent decree governing your behavior when it was in full effect in a
lawsuit in which people with disabilities sued NIRPC and transit providers for
failing to comply with the ADA. Your efforts to avoid meaningful public input
were so extreme as to risk a finding of contempt of court. You demonstrated
your lack of respect for this community and for the legal system. You have
refused to cooperate with ECCIL to solicit public input from people with
disabilities who rely upon public transit.
Taking you at face value, I logged into the
system. The letter you sent says you will ask about traffic congestion compared
to five years ago, whether public transportation is good and reliable, and
whether sidewalks and bike lanes serve my needs. Not a single question going to
these issues was included in the survey. I have merely been asked to track my
travel on a given day on a form. It seems the sole use of such information
would be to justify further highway funds to continue depriving transit systems
and to continue your decades-long assault on our urban centers. Despite the $276,130.00
paid to the survey “consultant,” the PDF form is not fillable.
Let me tell you a little about my travel. I
live in Gary. I allow at least three hours to travel to court dates in downtown
Chicago because I cannot risk being late. The roads are so frequently congested
and at a complete stop that I am often grateful for having allowed myself the
extra time, arriving just barely in time for court. Because you have long
chosen to hire on a patronage basis, staffing your office with sub-literates
who are technocratically educated (if at all), none of the region’s roads have
resilience. Resilience is a planning term meaning that there is an alternate
traffic corridor when one is impassible. Recently, I have seen people re-routed
from U.S. 51 to a small rural road east of Portage. That should be a cause for
deep shame.
Similarly, U.S. 65 has been impassible for a
long time. Now, U.S. 51—a nearby north-south corridor—is impassible. In
addition, U.S. 12/20 is reduced to one lane or less through Gary—making it
difficult for people to avoid the U.S. 65 on ramp and travel across Gary to the
Broadway or Grant Street ramps or to various tollway ramps (should they choose
to pay to sit at a complete standstill for hours at a time on the tollway).
Anyone with a basic knowledge of planning would have worked around this.
However, you—and your contractors—prefer the cash-grab style of purporting to
do government-funded work on all the roads at one time.
My husband travels to work in Merrillville.
Your agency has long made ideological choices to favor south Lake County,
Porter County, LaPorte County--rural communities and sprawl--rather than
allocating any money to north Lake County. (In fact, as you know, Gary Public
Transportation does an excellent job but is not funded by NIRPC and picks up
much of the slack for your incompetence by serving communities well beyond
Gary’s border—Merrillville and Hammond, for example. In contrast, NICTD is an
exercise in futility, but I understand that it is not funded by NIRPC.)
My husband has been unable to access I-65
South for many months. I do not know what you have convinced yourself you are
doing, but we well remember the time Clay Street was closed for over a year and
no work whatsoever was done during that time. Regardless of what governmental
funding sources were told, it reopened in the same shape it was in when it
closed.
Once my husband arrives in Merrillville, he
faces on overly-congested U.S. 30 corridor. Your poor ideological choices
resulted in emphasizing this area, but your execution is so sub-par that it is
still not passable. Of course, now you have dumped billions of dollars into
developing this area. It is safe to assume you have no plan for what to do now
that young people are eschewing the tasteless and materialistic lifestyle
associated with sprawl, chain restaurants, and malls. A rational choice would
have been to develop healthy urban areas with vibrant transit options, but you
not only left that barn door open—you burned the barn, starving the urban areas
and using NIRPC to actively generate blight.
NIRPC’s incompetence and commitment to
far-right ideology has destroyed Northwest Indiana. It is unlikely the
communities affected by your agency will become livable communities. Pay your
consultants. Read your surveys. Collect your paychecks. And, let us not forget:
use your very liberal tab at local restaurants. Where do y’all go now that
Country Lounge is gone?
Sincerely,
