Draper Pays the Price

As anyone who visits can tell, Draper has been practicing redneck land use planning for about 20 years. Billy Bob wants to turn his farm into 100 houses, a truck stop, a strip mall, and a church? No problem. We'll worry about infrastructure (other than the church) some other time.

Up on the wind tunnel that is SunCrest, that "later, dude" attitude toward infrastructure is coming home with a vengeance. It seems nobody bothered to check the soils up there, and now the roads are falling apart. The current estimated price tag is $10 million, but expect that to be revised upward. The finger-pointing is starting in earnest, but there will be plenty of blame to go around. Expect this to be a drain in the Draper budget for awhile.

In the mean time, the residents up there need to start preparing. If no one checked the soils under the roads, did anyone check under the houses? That ridge is basically just a big sand and gravel pile. At the least, they'd better get some serious 4-wheel-drive vehicles to negotiate those roads. I'm not talking about the weinie Hummers those folks normally drive. I'm talking about something real. Like my old Subaru Loyale.