ITD responsible for delays in permit review

I was struck to hear Rep. George Eskridge's rather impassioned plea to the ITD Board to lay blame for the byway's permitting woes on the Army Corps of Engineers. In particular, he singled out an individual at the Corps who was in an ITD funded position and suggested the path to resolution was to withhold funding for her job.

Having read ITD's most recent response to the Corps information request it is obvious that is an agency that is behaving in a near lawless manner in their destructive "win at any cost" pursuit of their proposed solution for the bypass. Their response makes a mockery of well understood federal regulations; facts need not apply to this permit application.

If Representative Eskridge is indeed interested in serving his constituency by bringing improvements to U.S. 95, I suggest that he instead hold ITD responsible for their own actions and insist that their efforts be driven by compliance with federal regulations.

This is an easy permit to secure for agencies that chose the path of compliance. The sooner that ITD starts looking in the mirror to find the source of their woes with the byway project the sooner we can start building a highway that will relieve Sandpoint's traffic congestion problem.

STEVE POTTER

Citizens for the Sandpoint Tunnel