Airport tunnel talks delayed
Posted May 10, 2011 4:55 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The final hour is looming for a deal on the airport tunnel but city council and the Airport Authority haven’t spoken in days.
The airport authority has set a Friday deadline for the $295-million project, while the city says it has until Monday.
Ald. Jim Stevenson tells 660News the airport authority hasn’t returned their calls in several days.
“We’ve been trying to get together with them to finalize a number of issues, and we’ve had difficulty doing that,” he says. “They haven’t returned our calls in a few days.”
He says that’s frustrating.
“You know, you’d think that when we had just a few days left that we’d be meeting each day and trying to get the details done, but that doesn’t seem to be the way they’re doing it,” he says.
Stevenson says there is still one major sticking point that needs to be ironed out. The Authority is calling for a series of overchanges on Airport Trail to be built by a certain date, a move that will cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars.
He says they’re open to the idea, but they can’t deliver the overpasses on the Authority’s time line.
“It may be 15 or 20 years before they’re necessary, but we can’t commit a future council to guarantee that those will be built at a certain time,” he says. “We can agree to build those over passes, but we can’t agree to the airport triggering a time line.”
Despite the lack of communication, Stevenson says he still believes they’ll hash out the plan by the weekend, because they are so close to a deal.
