Morine Kovich

10/18/07 My visit with the Mayor, and why I'm voting YES on Nov. 6th.

Thanks for all your "figuring" in Sharon Boyd: Trinity's Vote yes group anything but small. I thought I would pass on to you my own encounter with the Mayor and Mrs. Leppert at the Temple Emanuel debate (10/07):

I left the debate at the same time the Mayor was leaving, arriving at the exit door together. He said he didn't think we'd met and said he was Tom Leppert. I introduced myself, Morine Kovich. Mr.Mayor, I started to say when he interrupted, "Tom"; Morine, here, I said.

I spent 20 years of my life educating the public on the great forest and the Trinity. I was acting director of Texas Committee on Natural Resources at the time (a statewide nonprofit conservation group) and knew how much exploring, tramping up and down the river to check levees, organizing hundreds of outdoor enthusiasts to take hikes in the woods. We brought in American Rivers from D.C., took them Down River, which is a regular wide river with lots of water. A river with dams to form lakes does not leave much water for down river folks, like us.

When he told me his spiel: Traffic congestion, etc. The solution: A toll road ON THE RIVER. I told him that did not jibe with my vision: A hundred thousand trucks a day moving over the toll road, coming from the Mexican border, where NO trucks are being inspected now, and headed to Canada and points east and west.

What's your solution? How about setting up traffic camera monitors, with tow trucks, highway cops, EMS people stationed along the I-30 corridor, especially downtown and on south and north I35E. Wouldn't work, he said flatly. Why not? Just wouldn't.

Well, I told him that I had been traveling that I-30 to downtown since it opened and to this day really have seen no stationed help to keep the road cleared and traffic moving.

Ms. Boyd, I'm now 86, a former investigative reporter and editor and columnist for many papers. I've managed one congressional campaign (for Victor Morales) in l998 and helped Pauline Dixon in 2000 in the 32nd District. My political work goes back to the 1940's

Here's the crux of this report: In Tuesday's DallasNews, a key city council committee recommended that the Sheriff's Dept. take over patrols of accidents on I-30 and I-35 South.

So much for the toll road's traffic solution. I really don't believe those working for the Vote No group are being UPFRONT. Yes, I believe my vision of those rickety and un-inspected trucks just could happen if we don't VOTE YES NOV. 6