Quick, let's finance some big unnecessary projects before the banks disappear!

As the road and sprawl lobby salivates over the big pie up in Portland ($4.2B, yes, that's a B, as in "beeeelions and beeeeelions"), there's a tidy little piece of sprawl pie being floated here down here in Salem too -- The Willamette River Crossing, estimated at a juicy $660M ... not bad. The construction and consulting firms hoping this gem will pay for a few BMWs are probably getting a little nervous about how closely this thing is being sliced, what with banks about to drop like flies, having only started to unravel from the real estate fiasco (which this bridge is partly about propping up--helping sprawl developers who keep pushing houses further and further out). If they can't get this thing funded soon, it will probably never, ever happen.