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A meeting of the Eastern Shore Metropolitan Planning Organization could spell the end of the Mobile River toll bridge. Mobile’s MPO already voted to table the plan until October 7th, the date of a crucial meeting of the state’s toll authority. Without approval from the two county MPOs, the project can not get federal funding.
The turnout from anti-toll protesters is expected to be so high that the meeting’s venue had to be changed from the Fairhope courthouse to the Fairhope City Council Chambers. Opposition to the tolling of the new bridge has exploded in just a few months. A group set up on Facebook to organize resistance has grown to around 55,000 members, led by State Auditor Jim Zeigler.
Governor Kay Ivey and ALDOT director John Cooper have been vigorously defending the project over the past few weeks. They have had a tough time of it, as questions have mounted over the project’s rising costs, why new gas tax money is not being used for it, and why they claimed 100-year flood standards were being applied to the bayway when they are not mandatory.
If the ESMPO votes against the bridge altogether, the project is likely doomed. If they vote to table the proposal for now, as Mobile’s MPO did, it will live to fight another day.