Over on the Dallas Observer’s site, Jim Schutze ticks through a surprisingly long list of Trinity Toll Road backers who are hanging up their spurs. We spoke earlier in the week about the retirement of Trinity Trust founder Gail Thomas, and we know that A.C. Gonzalez is making way for our new city manager, T.C. Broadnax. But the list doesn’t stop there. John Crawford, the long-time head of DowntownDallas Inc. and John Scovell, president of Ray Hunt’s Woodbine Development, are also calling it quits.
With all of these prominent backers of the toll road stepping down before the toll road has been built, Schutze believes that the 20-year-old plan to build a highway in the Trinity — what he cheekily calls “the Battle of the Bathtub — is as close to being dead as it ever has been:
While so many key figures in the Battle of the Bathtub are retiring, new faces are coming on the scene every day, and more and more familiar faces are already against the tub. Former City Council member Angela Hunt, who led an unsuccessful referendum in 2008 to get the road out of the tub, is still very much at hand and in play. Current council members Mark Clayton, Sandy Greyson, Scott Griggs, Philip Kingston, Adam Medrano and B. Adam McGough are all opposed, meaning they are within two of having enough votes to shoot it in the head.
