Stand Up for Sanity, tonight, 6:30, Salem City Hall

This is it -- public hearing on the biggest boondoggle ever proposed, a make-work corporate welfare, land speculator subsidy extravaganza, the "Salem River Crossing," with a Liar's budget of   $670 MILLION, even though the planning budget alone is already overrun by FOUR years and 350%, blowing $7.5 million on a planned $2 million.

Read this great op-ed post (buried by the S-J in the small readership Monday paper instead of putting it in Sunday's):  http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012311050013

It's crucial that you vote, yes, but voting is not enough, it's just the bare minimum; a healthy democracy requires real citizen engagement, even though the powers that be would prefer that you stay home and watch the Ducks and other circuses.

This absurd boondoggle was the spark that got LOVESalem started.  The more we studied the absurd and intentionally deceptive and misleading output of the planning process, the more aware we became of the incredible void in Salem's information offerings, and we have aimed to help fill that void a bit, for going on five years now.  This unbelievably bad idea is only understandable as the last gasp of the auto dinosaur mindset, where the concrete lobby and the Polk County land speculators and developers make their final stand against the fiscal conservatism they like to profess (for others).

Although there is a strong chance that this project collapses on the immense weight of its own internal contradictions and the gossamer thinness of its financial funding likelihood, there are still good reasons not to take that for granted.  In other words, we still need you to come out tonight and help drive some nails into this monster's skull, because this is a zombie idea, and they never really die.  Even though the chance of this being built is low, the harm from the boondoggle is already being felt, and if it were actually launched, Salem would become yet another city destroyed in the name of auto sprawl.  The harm is too great to ignore this.  Come out tonight and demand that this process be stopped, and that the money being wasted on high priced planning consultants be used for our real needs.