The Price of a Mile of Road
When a $12,000 road project near Prosser had to be torn up and rebuilt after only four years, Kennewick residents questioned the real cost of 'education' for county road planners.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
We are officially informed that the people of the West side have learned how to build roads and can now make the most of the money expended. No doubt. But it might be interesting to know just how much tax money it has cost the property owners of the East side to educate the county seat road builders. The delegation from the Taxpayers’ Union, which recently visited Kennewick, brought with them the information that $12,000 of the public money had been expended in building one mile of road out of Prosser and that now, after four years, the road is being plowed up and rebuilt. Perhaps this $12,000 can not be justly figured as road expenditure, but must be charged to education. If the farmers who for eight years have been hauling their produce to market and their children to school over unimproved sand roads have no desire for better highways, they just crave to be educated, that's all. The sugar coating has worn off of these $12,000 doses and they are getting hard to swallow.
“The sugar coating has worn off of these $12,000 doses and they are getting hard to swallow.”
This editorial captures the perennial friction between rural taxpayers and centralized government spending on infrastructure. While the dollar amounts have changed significantly, the frustration of local citizens watching tax dollars disappear into experimental or poorly executed road projects remains a familiar civic grievance in the Tri-Cities area today.
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