Because it’s only, you know, like, the biggest story ever, we continue Day 2 of our exhaustive coverage of Will Wynn’s weird road-rage incident. As Oct. 11 – the day the 18-wheels stopped – was a council Thursday, Wynn spoke to the traffic tie-up that morning from the dais. (Yet he managed to leave out anything about ripping the Monarch crew a new asshole. Funny, that.) What’s shocking was that such a horrific instance could have transpired right under our noses – and lest you think me hyperbolic, check the council meeting transcript, where Wynn calls it a “crisis” requiring its own ordinance passed in “emergency session.” Oh wait, since there are already, you know, laws regarding blocked traffic, guess that won’t be happening.
Read the relevant transcript after the jump.
Closed Caption Log, Council Meeting, 10/11/07:
Before I walk through the – our schedule this morning and afternoon, at this time I’ll take a minute to ask if there are potential upcoming items from council for future agendas. I will say that I plan to bring an item, with the help of the law department, for next week, and I apologize to the thousands apparently of commuters this morning who are inconvenienced on West Fifth Street. Obviously there’s lots of both private construction going on in Downtown, but also a fair amount of city-sponsored road work, utility and road work. West Fifth Street, of course, is a major access point to our Downtown, and as we have begun essentially the conversion of Cesar Chavez, West Fifth Street actually becomes more important an access point into our downtown. With all the construction that is occurring Downtown, the private construction, we have certain rules in place for the times that certain things can happen. And when it’s appropriate, we waive those and work with the builders to – to balance the convenience of the construction techniques with that of neighbors who are trying to sleep at night perhaps and commuters into Downtown. For instance, the project on West Fifth Street on the banks of Shoal Creek, we have been allowing that project to have their continuous concrete pours. That is, we begin them let pouring concrete about 3:00 in the morning. It’s a little bit of trade-off in that some neighbors perhaps don’t sleep as well that night, but it makes it significantly easier for commuters to get into our Downtown during the morning rush hour traffic period. Unfortunately even with that concurrence, unfortunately this morning that project had a delivery, an 18-wheeler delivering some product to the construction site, and as that truck driver tried to back into the construction site, he then got his wheels lodged on both settings of curbs. So here is an 18-wheeler parked perpendicular on West Fifth Street during rush hour traffic this morning, completely, completely halting all access into Downtown during rush hour. Had that truck driver waited perhaps 45 more minutes, simply pulled on to West Avenue, cooled his heels for an hour at most, the bulk of the rush hour traffic would have dispersed as that’s the morning commute into downtown. So I’ll be asking for an ordinance specifically related to timing of delivery and based on West Fifth Street being an access morning point into our downtown, having reasonable limited period of time when that – so that won’t happen again. Say 7:30 until 9:15 in the morning or something like that would have caused this morning’s crisis not to have occurred. And so I’ll be working with the law department and my colleagues to see if we can get that posted for the agenda next Thursday. We could pass it in emergency session and beginning hopefully immediately there will be a period of time – and we might also suggest that that ordinance only last for maybe even the next six months or so while Caesar Chavez is going to be somewhat limited in its eastbound morning carrying capacity because of that construction project. So I think we can be more judicious with how we try to balance the challenge of good private sector tax base in development occurring in our downtown and enabling commuters to get in and out of our Downtown. That will be my item next Thursday.
This article appears in November 23 • 2007.