The City's proposed Blairstone Expressway through residential Tallahassee is a $42 million blunder that squanders economic opportunities, no matter how staunchly the Tallahassee Democrat defends it. The Thomasville Road "flyover" blunder pales by comparison.

The expressway will worsen urban sprawl in the northeast, distort our transportation system even more, degrade vibrant in-town neighborhoods, damage key wetlands, increase air pollution, and subvert our "southern strategy" to revitalize our neglected areas south and west of downtown. At a cost of $42 million for less than three miles, it is also indefensibly expensive.

Make no mistake. This is no"parkway" or "boulevard."  It is a central urban expressway designed to speed cars from I-10 and beyond through our city's residential core at 50 to 60 miles per hour with a minimum of traffic signals and unimpeded by people, neighborhoods, or other obstacles.

It is the same kind of expressway built in hundreds of other cities from coast to coast - to their regret. If we can learn anything from the last half-century of American urban history, it is that these expressways kill neighborhoods and hasten downtown blight. In fact, I/we challenge the Democrat to show us a growing city where one of these expressways has improved its urban core.

Perhaps most important, the Blairstone Expressway sets back our efforts to create a private economy here of high-skilled, high-paying jobs that provide career alternatives to state employment. By lavishing our limited penny sales tax funds on a project that creates no such new jobs, it delays much more urgently needed road projects.

Tallahassee Chamber leaders and others have long noted the lack of sites in Leon County for large commercial and light industrial enterprises. The Chamber`s Economic Development Council Web page, in fact, now displays only two areas totaling less than 35 acres for such sites available today. Southwood developers plan to offer 250 acres for industry, but only in its second 10-year phase, between the years 2010 and 2020. Innovation Park is available only for research enterprises.

This shortage will continue at least until 2010 primarily because Capital Circle from Tram Road to North Monroe and Crawfordville Highway are congested, two-lane roads that beg for widening but won`t be widened for at least another decade.

As a result, our south and west sides can accommodate almost none of the commercial and light industrial enterprises they are well suited for. Building there is barred by concurrency requirements that rightly require adequate roads and other infrastructure before more development can occur.

Because of this, we recently almost lost one of our county`s top private employers, Watkins Engineering, and its nearly 200 professional and high-skilled jobs, to another county. Concurrency requirements barred construction of a new office building for Watkins near northwest Capital Circle.

We prevented the loss of those jobs only by waiving the concurrency requirement, a painful decision that is a measure of how badly we need high-value economic growth. We cannot afford to make any more such exceptions.

We have to stop paying lip service and get serious about growing a private economy that employs Tallahasseeans to create goods and services here that the rest of the world wants to pay dearly for. We have to get serious about enabling economic development where it can do the most good.

Widening all of Capital Circle and Crawfordville Highway would do this. It would unlock tremendous economic potential that is only a distant dream today. It would put Tallahassee on the map as a business-friendly community with a highly-skilled work force and room for new enterprises.

Even better, it would require only $60 million, at current estimates, to widen the rest of Capital Circle, 16 miles, and $27 million to widen Crawfordville Highway, eight miles. For that matter, it would cost only $11.5 million to widen Mahan Drive from Dempsey Mayo Road to I-10, over three miles, a project now at least 10 years away from completion.

Instead, the City is hell-bent to spend $42 million for less than three miles of the Blairstone Expressway.

These and other higher-priority road projects should be receiving city and county funding, not the "Cadillac" (the Democrat`s unwittingly appropriate term) Blairstone Expressway.

Let`s stop the project now and use the money where it will do some good. In those famous words, "It`s the economy, stupid!"