Are you seriously going to compare the 15 block trolley to those huge iconic pieces of ART. Lets be realistic here, the trolley will be an eye sore. Not a piece of art. Nice try though.

I also have a feeling that most people around here don’t care where Tony Bennett left his heart and are more concerned with their own. A trolley is not going to help make up their minds. There are alot of people that have left their heart in Boise without a trolley.

Space Needle= privately funded and erected for the 1962 Seattle World Fair.

Eiffel Tower= Built commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution (close comparison).

Statue of liberty= donated by France and dedicated on October 28, 1886, is a monument commemorating the centennial of the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence (another close comparison).

Sistine Chapel, seriously the Sistine chapel when we are talking about the 15 block trolley, WOW.

Bieter’s, Trolley= Still POINTLESS.

Do you think Tony Bennett would have left his heart in a city where little cable cars run halfway to the stars on rubber tires?

We could use the money for schools and things that actually need the money.

The trolley is completely pointless. We do need a train/tram/trolley (whatever) like Utah has that goes from St.George(Caldwell) to Salt Lake (Boise or even Mt.Home) way before a 15 block down town trolley.

Boise needs to start looking at a bigger picture which just may include county and state wide issues, not a multimillion dollar trolley.

As far as your surfing analogy goes, we are all surfing. No one is drowning since we have no say in it but it may not be all that progressive to walk to the edge of you board and hang all your toes off the end. It may look cool but it may just be a stupid idea after you lawn dart yourself on the bottom of the ocean and leave yourself paralyzed.

Above all, is it really fair that only 4 people get to decide to commit the city to over $60 million in tax expenditures, with a 20 year minimum LID tax on downtown businesses? If that is how you see things should be done, I pity your position. The people of the city should get to decide on this one, not four people. It puts far too much power into the hands of a few, not the way the government should work.

Some folks put their brain cells on autopilot about the time they learned to tie their shoes. The world is changing, and that scares them. Where did they ever learn to think that the world was a safe place that was always going to be the same? The world has always been changing. It comes in waves, and your choices have always been to surf or drown. It will be changing long after we all take a dirt nap. The time to be scared is when things stall, because then you are dead – or might as well be.

How did cars and suburbia become the only measures of happiness some folks have? There is something fundamentally wrong with our culture if that is the only yardstick these folks find to tell how they are doing. No wonder this “I-got-mine-forget-everyone-else” mentality that leads to falling school budgets at a time of unparalleled prosperity, and all these older folks who don’t want to have to pay school taxes because their kids aren’t in school. Somehow, they’re threatened because some choose to follow another path – and it doesn’t seem to matter at all what the other path might be; any idea they don’t have themselves is pronounced wrong, and I find that to be a far greater threat to our way of life than many other trends.

Fortunately, these totally devoid of ideas folks have little effect
other than to delay the inevitable. (In which case, they do a Congressman Delay, who had the gall to show up at the opening of the Houston light rail line and claim he was always for it – this after 20 years of stalling even a nickel’s worth of government funds to be spent on the project. Like San Diego, it was built with totally local funds – and they’ve already voted to expand, even before the new line opened. I tell ya, it’s enough to give politicians a bad name.)

Build the line. You’ll love it just as every other city loves the lines they built.

As for the open houses, it wouldn’t surprise me that most of the people that show up to them are pro-streetcar. It’s the same thing that happened at the open house at the Boise Depot when Crapo was talking about Amtrak coming back – the only people that showed up were people that were train buffs. Open houses and focus groups typically will attract more PRO people than CON people. The open houses also will control and ONLY PRESENT ONE SIDE of the debate. That’s just a fact, the CCDC knows it, and it’s all part of the spin machine.

As for Portland streetcar costs being ‘cheap’ – theirs cost over $100 million for a 4-mile section. They have had to increase parking fees, and their LID tax rates have increased over 70% yet their ridership has DECREASED over the last year.

Portland also now has a road paving backlog which it approaching $500 million – partly because they have dumped so much money into rail projects. The increased fees, taxes and backlogs plus other shortfalls have more than negated any economic benefit they derived from their system – not to mention streetcar overhead wires trash the esthetics of wherever they are put in.

Streetcars cannot be expanded cheaply – they are one of the most expensive forms of transit known, typically costing $25 to $30 million per mile plus exorbitant maintenance and operating costs.

1. Will Boise’s $40 million TIGER application affect VRT’s $25 million TIGER application?

2. Will Boise/CCDC sign over the streetcar to VRT as they did with the BUS system? VRT was voted in by citizens to be the Transit Authority in Ada and Canyon counties.

3. CCDC is considering passing resolution 1194 mostly for a group seeking local option taxes for transit at the state level. 1194 states though:
“Idahoans should be empowered to decide:
1. What mobility choices they want to in their community
2. How to pay for the choices they make.”

Will CCDC allow Boise citizens to vote on a Trolley?

link to resolution 1194 pdf http://drop.io/hrdldjc#