Koch Money Seeps Into Milwaukee to Oppose Streetcar

Back in September we wrote about the various ways the Koch brothers are using their money to upend local transit projects. Four months later, Koch money is intensifying the assault against two more transit lines.

Right now in the DC region, opponents of the Purple Line are trotting out Koch-funded "expert" Randall O'Toole, whom the press still consider to be a legitimate authority on transportation issues despite his completely cartoonish ideas.

And Bruce Murphy at Urban Milwaukee says it's happening in Wisconsin's largest city as well. As the city prepares to build a streetcar system, an opposition group has sprung up that is not what it claims to be, Murphy writes:

There has been a lot of misinformation about the streetcar floating around the city. Two aldermen have been arguing, falsely, that if the the project was killed, the money could be used for other things like road repairs and schools. The $55 million in federal money must be dedicated to Milwaukee transit as a result of a federal Civil Rights decision against the administration of former Governor Tommy Thompson, which tried to block local transit investment in the 1990s. The Federal Transit Administration has already released the funds as a grant for the Milwaukee Streetcar, and says the money cannot be repurposed, reports Politifact.

Elsewhere on the Streetsblog Network: Transportation for America responds to last night's State of the Union address. The Dallas Morning News' Transportation Blog reports that in Dallas, and elsewhere, people of color are more likely to be stopped for bicycling infractions. And NextSTL's Richard Bose explains why he sorta likes the state of Missouri's bare-bones transportation plan, released as an apparent scare tactic after voters rejected a major sales tax increase.