On May 15, 2018, Omaha voters will be asked to approve $151 million of Street And Highway Transportation Bonds (which we will refer to as “Street Bonds”). In return for this approval, the City commits to complete some transportation projects.
Mode Shift believes it is incumbent on the City to perform three steps:
- Inform the voters what projects it plans to fund with the Street Bonds
- Account for Street Bond spending and progress of the planned projects
- Disclose how it selects the projects that receive Street Bond funding
We covered the first topic in Part 1, where we reported that the City gets high marks, and the second topic in Part 2, where we reported that the City veers wildly from its plans without accountability.
In this final blog, we examine the third step and find that the City ignores the transparent and objective governance promised by the City charter and follows an opaque, visionless, subjective process that perpetuates the fiscally unsustainable, disjointed, band-aid projects that the City’s own Transportation Master plan warns against.
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Tags: Omaha, public, Street bonds, transparency, transportation