September 28th, 2006 – The Tribune

The past two days you have devoted articles to Nipomo’s Willow Road funding being up in the air and to the Dalidio Ranch initiative with questions about where the funding will come for the Prado Road Interchange and for Willow. The funding will come from people who live in the county and their taxes. Pure and simple.

I spent seven years as the chair of the Traffic and Circulation Committee for the South County Advisory Council. The plan for Willow Road, which is designed to take the population from the Woodlands to the freeway, was to be completed by 2006 for $10 million. Over the years the cost factor for Willow has grown to the tune of $40 million with a completion date of 2025 or 2030. No ground has been broken for the road, but the analysts, engineers and consultants are getting paid. That’s it.

We are told that development will pay for the roads and improvements. Not in this case. The costs keep rising, but the impact fees collected from the Woodlands development have already been allocated and the amount collected is not even a third of what it will cost to build Willow in today’s dollars.

As your article articulates as to what some solutions might be, the costs will nonetheless be passed down to the taxpayer one way or the other. Yet, that was not how Willow Road was “sold” to the public back when.

I suggest caution when something like a Prado interchange is being bantered about as the taxpayers will be paying for that regardless of how the sales pitch today sounds.

If it looks like a duck, and sounds like duck …

Marianne Buckmeyer, Arroyo Grande