Dayton Construction

UPDATE 9/7: Great Miami Boulevard is open from Main to Grand in both directions. It's still not open from Grand to Riverview and Forest. They also spread the wood chips around on the play scape, but it's still taped up. Children were playing on it today anyway. That bulldozer is still sitting in the park.

Here's the link to the last Dayton Construction post. They turned on the street lights on the new boulevard, and they opened up the intersection below the Dayton Art Institute. The intersection is really screwy. If you're coming from Main, you have to stop before the new boulevard, way far from the light. If you're coming from Salem, you still have to drive around the island in the road, basically making a U-turn to turn onto Forest. The new Great Miami Boulevard is still closed, but I bet there will lots of wrecks there once it opens.

For some reason the city cut down all the trees on the levee in front of McPherson Town. They cut down 16 trees that were growing out of the levee. On 13 of them, they left the trunks about six feet high. On three of them, they just cut off all the branches and large tree skeletons standing. It's bizarre. I have no idea why they would cut down all those nice trees. They can't rip them out of the levee because that would compromise the levee.

Angry people posted signs on the stumps.

It turns out that new federal regulations written after Hurricane Katrina forced the local government to cut the trees down. What a crock. The federal government proved during Katrina that it knows far less about levees than the people who built the local levees. Those trees were reportedly 75 years old, and they hadn't harmed the levee yet. I bet they made the levee stronger. Since these pictures were taken, the government has further cut down the three skeleton trees and cut many of the stumps off near ground level, effectively removing the signs on those stumps. But some stumps are still about six feet tall and displaying signs. I assume the government will come back a forth time and cut down those last stumps. Only government could take four passes to cut down 16 trees.

And as this picture shows, they still haven't spread the wood chips on the playground and opened it for children to play on. They installed three ground lights around the flag pole behind the left pile of chips. I assume they plan to fly a flag on that pole for the first time that I can remember since I came back here in 2003.

As you can see, there's piece of heavy equipment that will be used to spread the chips around sitting idle. It's been sitting there idle for over a week now. This more of the ubiquitous squandering of wealth that government does. If that park generated revenue, it would have been operational within hours of the arrival of those chips. If the boulevard generated revenue, it would have been operational in two months or so after this project started. Instead, both the park and the boulevard have been squandering wealth for 15 months.