On Sunday a New York Times article reported on some of the more ambitious construction projects around the country being proposed as a way to soak up of those hundreds of billions of dollars in Obama economic stimulus funds.
None listed are in Ohio but that's just because we don't have Jim Rhodes with us anymore. Rhodes was our four-term Republican governor (1963-1971, 1975-1983) at a time when the word "trillion" was used only by astronomers.
Still, Rhodes managed to sprinkle county airports and community colleges across most of Ohio's 88 counties. Nobody was ever as "shovel ready" when it came to promoting jobs as was our former governor.
One of Rhodes' more audacious proposals was for the construction of a bridge across Lake Erie, linking Ohio with Ontario. The cost would have approached $1 billion, real money in those days. But it never got off the ground, mostly being laughed to death.
Only Rhodes, it seemed, thought it feasible to take a mid-winter drive on a bridge spanning a lake notorious for its violent storms and historic toll of sunken ships.
http://www.cleveland.com/stpats/index.ssf?/heritage/more/canada/canamisc.html
But maybe Rhodes was on to something -- just a few decades too early.
Among the projects cited in the Times piece was a proposed six-lane bridge across the Detroit River to link the motor city with Canada.
The multi-billion dollar Michigan project is needed because "Detroit is linked to Canada only by a tunnel and an 80-year-old privately owned bridge," explains the newspaper.
Somewhere Jim Rhodes is saying, "I told you so!"
(Gray Hunter)
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