In the months before Utah began rebuilding its major north-south interstate, a public relations firm chose “’Satch” to guide motorists through the coming years of highway turmoil. Named after the “Wasatch Front,” the towering mountains forming the Great Salt Lake Basin’s eastern wall, ’Satch embodied the “spirit of Utah’s roads,” according to the public relations team that dreamed him up. But Utahns never connected with the grizzled, smiling hobo who seemingly materialized from nowhere, sometimes squeezing a concertina, sometimes waving at motorists from the roadside.
They snubbed ’Satch almost instantly. “This is crazy,” said one critic of the $400,000 ad campaign. “What an irresponsible waste of our tax dollars,” another complained in a letter to The Salt Lake Tribune. “Please ... don’t insult our intelligence, make us more angry and waste more of our tax money having stupid people doing childish TV commercials,” another implored. 'Satch got sacked soon after.
Their handling of the 'Satch fiasco has been typical of how the Utah media has covered many of the transportation issues that have sprung into public view in recent months. The media has largely taken a conservative role, not driving coverage but rather serving as a vehicle for basic public information. In the case of the highway project mascot, “sack Satch” editorials followed letters to the editor. Meanwhile, routine coverage focuses on how to navigate the construction and why construction is being done a certain way. Many reports refer to the Olympics — the federal dollars it may bring for new infrastructure, the added traffic it will generate and that sort of thing.
The reality is that Utahns recognized long ago that the state needed to improve its transportation infrastructure. Interstate 15 was crumbling long before the International Olympic Committee announced in June, 1995, that Salt Lake City would play host to the 2002 Winter Games. Potholes and congestion provided daily reminders that I-15 already had exceeded its life expectancy by more than a decade. Chunks of fallen concrete punctuated warnings that no fewer than 17 bridges needed immediate replacement. Local media had little to say about the problems, though, until transportation officials began their public education campaign for I-15 last fall.
Now the Games and transportation improvements have become inexorably interlaced. Utahns are eager to project the image of a world-class city when some 300,000 athletes and spectators arrive for the two-week winter sportsfest. The Olympics has given them a golden reason to pave highways, lay tracks and update the airport. It has given them a cause to rally, a hometown team to cheer, a reason to shrug off the expense and the hassle.
In fact, the state’s premier transportation project truly is an Olympian undertaking. The current demolition and rebuilding of I-15 is the state’s largest-ever public works project. And, with its $1.6 billion price tag, it is one of the largest single contracts ever let on the interstate highway system. I-15 forms a north-south arc that drapes across Utah like a beauty pageant sash. For a few miles, it also doubles as the intersection of a major east-west route, Interstate-80. The 17 miles slated for reconstruction lie in the Salt Lake Valley, the heart of a four-county area that holds more than four of every five Utahns. When the work is done, I-15 will have eight lanes instead of six and a high-tech traffic-management system guaranteed to minimize congestion.
Project officials knew from the beginning the media would play an important role, and they have been careful to build solid relationships with local news organizations. Each week, the I-15 team distributes detailed reports on upcoming ramp and road closures, as well as warnings about the spots where delays are most likely to occur. The reconstruction team generally has liked the coverage. Its in-house polling has shown that newspapers, radio and television continue to be the main source of information for people who want to know what is happening on the reconstruction. Says I-15 spokeswoman Lindsey Ferrarri: “The biggest surprise is how much attention it’s gotten.”
Utah Department of Transportation Director Tom Warne, a veteran of a similar project in Arizona, is the reconstruction’s coach and captain. Looking more like a schoolboy in a suit than the philosophical muscle behind an earth-moving fleet, he pushed to use an unconventional approach for I-15. Instead of bidding the project’s design and construction jobs separately, with the state taking an oversight role, his agency bid the whole I-15 contract as a single job to be planned and executed by a teams of engineers, contractors and UDOT employees.
“Design/build,” as this approach is called, offers the state high risks and rewards. The chancy part is drawing designs just a step ahead of rebuilding the roads. It seems a formula for mistakes and delays.
At the same time, project planners have built in enormous rewards, both in dollars and goodwill. The state expects to save an estimated $500 million by using design/build. In addition, this contracting approach will cut construction time from about eight years to a projected four and a half — offering a completion date that gets the project done a few months before the Games. The shorter construction time means fewer traffic jams, motorist complaints and other construction-related headaches. Warne’s agency is not just guessing how the public will respond; its pre-reconstruction polling shows a majority of Utahns favor more intense inconvenience for a shorter time.
To pacify skeptics, the I-15 team notes the contract includes incentives that give the private contractors bonuses of up to $50 million for completing the work on budget and on time. If things take longer, the companies have agreed to monetary penalties. Wasatch Constructors, the engineering and construction consortium that won the bid in March and broke ground in April, asserts it is months ahead of schedule.
The media seems to be watching for missteps, but just months into construction, none has been reported. That doesn’t mean the watch has been abandoned, though. Reporters know that, even if things go as smoothly as planned, the $1.6 billion reconstruction guarantees years of daily hassles and tax penny-pinching that will provide good material for stories.
It may portend slippery political terrain ahead, but it would be hard to guess that from watching Utah’s Republican governor. Telegenic and moderate, Michael O. Leavitt was wildly popular before I-15 came into full view, and he has had to expend little political capital over the transportation program. He won reelection in 1996 by capturing three of every four votes cast in the race.
Like other political candidates that year, he declined to talk about the transportation-related tax increases that would be needed to get the project underway, and The Salt Lake Tribune pointed out this omission prior to the election. It evidently did not matter to voters, though, when Leavitt stepped forward a month after the election with a plan to raise the gas-tax to help rebuild the highways.
The governor’s $2 .6 billion highway plan included a two-step gasoline-tax increase to 24.5 cents from 19.5 cents a gallon. That, plus a near doubling of annual vehicle-registration fees to $21, would go a long way toward paying for a decade-long program. Not only did Leavitt emphasize the heaviest road users would pay more because they would be buying the most gas, but he also proposed that half the $2.6 million funding package would go to projects in rural areas — a key move aimed at shoring support among the rural lawmakers who dominate the Legislature and whose constituents would not have much use for the reconstructed I-15. Leavitt had about four months to sell his plan before the I-15 bid was to be opened and about a month before lawmakers were slated to begin their annual legislative session.
His toughest fights did not come from the public, or the opposing Democrats. They came instead from leaders in his own party, steered chiefly by no-government-growth forces in the House of Representatives. The lawmakers, angling for an edge on the popular governor, decried the tax increase. Immediately they began looking for $50 million a year in current-program cuts, along with ways to tap existing revenue sources. They hit a roadblock, however, as they tried to make the case the cuts would not squeeze funding for public schools, universities and family-service programs. Utah’s per-pupil spending already ranks 50th in the nation, and tuition increases were slated for most of the state’s nine universities. Critics accused the budget hawks of sacrificing people to pay for roads.
The GOP legislators did not agree to a compromise until the final week of their 45-day session. They demanded about $20 million in cuts from government spending each year, along with a 1/8th-cent shaving from the general sales tax. In exchange, the lawmakers allowed a 5 cents per gallon gas-tax hike.
Through this debate, the media had a tough job ferreting out stories that addressed the impact transportation will have on future budgets. It would have been impossible for last year’s stories to ignore the huge impact of highway funding on other programs since the sums involved are simply enormous for a state with a $5.5 billion budget. At the same time, Utah’s economy has been growing for more than six years and has generated surpluses larger than $200 million in a single year. That makes it difficult to show any harm being done.
Again, one needs only to look at the polls for evidence that the public believes all those involved are handling the reconstruction fairly well even after the rough-and-tumble in the Capitol. Leavitt has largely avoided blame for the gas-tax hike and traffic jams (both began last summer.) About 88 percent of Utahns surveyed last fall still rated his job performance “excellent” or “good.” And neither he nor the Legislature is being held accountable for the headaches the roads caused Utahns last summer.
Utah’s beleaguered Democrats are getting lots of mileage out of the ruling party’s handling of the transportation issue. For years, the Democrats’ initiatives have languished on the sidelines because the party holds so few elected positions in Utah. There are no Democrats in the state’s five-person congressional delegation, and just one Democrat — the attorney general — occupying a statewide elected office. In the 75-member House, there are 20 Democrats, and in the 29-member Senate, they hold just nine seats.
However, the Democratic party has seized the GOP’s transportation planning and construction as a forum for engaging in some full-contact politics. Throughout the general session, Democratic legislators attacked Republicans for their approach to transportation, calling it too little, too late and too harmful to typical Utahns.
They said middle- and lower-income residents would be pinched most painfully by the tax hike. They charged the cuts would “pave over people” most in need of government. When the Democrats developed their own budget plan that cut sales-tax exemptions awarded to the businesses, the governor and the legislative leadership still turned them away. The Democrats elbowed their way into the public debate anyhow, through the media.
Another slap at the majority took the form of two election-season billboards on congestion-plagued sections of I-15. The signs read “This traffic jam brought to you by 20 years of Republican leadership.” The slogan, which has been reproduced in bumper stickers the party now sells for $5 apiece, did little to persuade voters to throw more support behind their beleaguered party, but the Democrats have not abandoned hope their constant offensive will pay off — well — down the road. Party Chair Meghan Holbrook expects the point will make itself when the first heavy snows fall this winter and commuters struggle even harder to get to work.
Utah’s congressional delegation also has attracted some extra press scrutiny because of the transportation projects.
Freshman Merrill Cook landed on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee back in Washington, where he has the lead role in pitching for some $4.3 billion in federal dollars the state says it needs for all manner of airport, rail and highway programs that are being pegged to the Olympic Games. Curiously, about $662 million of the money he is seeking would go to the light rail system he fought for years to stop. “I have learned to accept defeat and move on,” he told legislators last year. A Republican who briefly went Independent for a few unsuccessful election seasons, Cook’s history as a turncoat apparently is haunting him in Congress. His two fellow Utahns in the U.S. House of Representatives voted against him on a key transportation measure last spring that would have brought more transportation funding to the state.
Another brow-raising situation involves veteran Rep. Jim Hansen. Chairman of the House Ethics Committee, he has agreed to investigate charges of wrongdoing against Rep. Bud Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican who has been accused of an unethical relationship with a transportation lobbyist who also served as his top campaign fundraiser. Shuster, chairman of the Transportation Committee, also is under scrutiny over a fundraising visit he made to Utah on behalf of Republican candidates.
For the local media, I-15 is the biggest story in town, and news purveyors have competed hotly to find provocative, yet service-minded approaches to indulge the public’s interest in the project.
All the outlets publicize basic information about ride-sharing, buses, the I-15 Web page and telephone hotline. Many are helping guide commuters through the maze of ramp and road closures and alternative routes with maps, video and real-time traffic reports. One AM radio station reportedly credits this summer’s traffic for boosting its listener audience growth by about 25 percent. The station provides a traffic report every ten minutes during drive time.
Both daily newspapers publish weekly maps and carry quarterly UDOT inserts about I-15 progress. One of the newspapers has organized a team of “road warriors” who periodically share their strategies for shaving time off their daily commutes. There have been missteps. Sometimes when a ramp has just closed, the television stations have set up cameras at the closure site to get a shot of traffic jams that never seem to materialize.
This transportation tale would not be complete without mentioning the people of Utah. The aggressive transportation program has meant casualties — a number of them deaths caused by detoured motorists traveling too fast on local streets.
Others who have suffered include opponents of the new light-rail system, TRAX, a necessary side project of I-15 reconstruction. Ground was broken last spring on the long-embattled transit train, which will run roughly alongside a few miles of the interstate. Opponents shouted from the sidelines with their angry posters, “You Can Pry My Steering Wheel From My Cold Dead Fingers” and “No TRAXation Without Representation.” Meanwhile, plans have hatched for a new west-to-east extension that would link the airport to Salt Lake City’s university district, the proposed location for the Olympic Village.
Also, it would be misleading to suggest there has not been lots of griping, because there’s plenty of it. Commuters have lost a lane of I-15 in each direction and many key ramps. Alternative routes not only have been jammed, but many were being patched and resurfaced all summer. (This ubiquitous construction confirms how ambitious the project is; the I-15 reconstruction is happening a year earlier than long-range planners expected.)
Even with the hassles and even with the 5-cent tax jump at the gas pumps this summer, many Utahns seem to be regarding the reconstruction as the kind of hardship you would expect for a team with its eyes on a prize, a big prize. Many look for ways to adapt. Having to face that, they’ve been having a love affair with their cars all these years, some have tried such alternatives as telecommuting, car-pooling and hopping on the bus. At work, it’s not uncommon to hear impromptu confessionals from otherwise decent folks for the first time feeling symptoms of road rage in their own hearts.
Then there are those who have decided the best tactic is to enjoy the ride. One advocate of this approach wrote a letter to the editor suggesting Utahns should cultivate an affection for orange traffic cones, which they can groove on with their favorite music during their commutes. Others talk about the virtues of staying home. “That’s characteristic of people in Utah,” says the governor’s spokeswoman, Vicki Varela. “When things are tough, people tend to hang together and work things through.”
When it’s all done, Utahns anticipate shining success. Traffic jams will dissipate, thanks to the high-tech gadgetry being laid along the highways. Travel routes will be covered with acres of smooth, black asphalt and easy-to-navigate interchanges. They will have 130 new bridges on I-15. And they can look forward to their day in the sun, not as the star athletes in the 2002 Olympic Games, but as the host city.
And maybe it would not be so far-fetched to see 'Satch make a comeback in Utah. If he trades that hobo garb for a star-spangled ice hockey uniform, or possibly a logo-spattered ski leotard, Utahns just might warm up to his spirit after all.