Where They At?

BY LOUIE OVERSTREET

The title of my column may lack grammatical correctness — but it correctly conveys how I feel about a group of community crazies and spineless politicians who advocated for the reopening of F Street to the tune of up to $17 million dollars, with no meaningful economic benefit to the community in the immediate vicinity of the underpass.

Now, they are adding insult to injury by allowing it to become a major social problem for residents in the immediate area. This arterial is a prime example of a road paved with good intentions leading to you know where.

Not since John Wesley closed his company, over a decade ago, has there been a local African-American contractor capable of performing highway related construction. Therefore, there was no chance that this fanciful boondoggle would benefit a minority contractor or the community in which the project was constructed.

I drove through the underpass a few weeks ago at around 11 a.m. My car was the only one on the street — and the underpass looked like a refugee camp. There were two pup tents, a lean-to, two shopping carts with pushers, and a half-dozen or so persons napping on bedding made of various types of material. A friend said that, “You haven’t seen anything yet.” Paraphrasing, he said the underpass looked like Woodstock on concrete in the evening.

The question becomes, who should be held accountable for the aftermath of this project? After all, it failed all tests for due diligence prior to construction, and the resulting neglect is now clearly evident. My answer is the City of Las Vegas, the Nevada Department of Transportation, as well as a few “community crazies” added to the mix for good measure. Since the city and the state were forced into constructing the re-opening, they jobbed community residents with the help of the crazies to construct a monument to government ineptitude. The fools who advocated for the project obviously had zero understanding of the law of unintended consequences.

Is there any wonder today, then, why no one knows where they at?