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Editorial: Senator on right route to redirecting I-75 interchange earmark funding
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The Common Cause lobby tried and failed. Maybe a U.S. senator from Oklahoma will have better luck getting the story behind congressional funding in 2005 that was supposed to go for overall Interstate 75 widening in Collier and Lee counties, but wound up being directed to an I-75/Coconut Road interchange in Estero.
Republican Tom Coburn proposes the probe as part of corrective legislation to send the $10 million for an interchange feasibility study back through Congress, then back out and on its way correctly to the six-laning project as a whole.
Lee County officials chose that approach, which declared local elected officials — rather than the intersection’s neighboring landowners who donated to an influential Alaskan U.S. House member — ought to make local road-building policy.
Coburn demonstrates that he understands the value and integrity of a public tax dollar. He believes that the congressional process, with members as a whole deciding how to spend those dollars, ought to mean something. It ought to withstand as-yet mysterious efforts to reallocate them later.
We hope Coburn sticks with it in the public interest.
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