Your Tax Dollars At Work

Downtown looking up

A Senate committee today is considering appropriations totalling $8 million to assist in the "revitalization" of Downtown Tuscaloosa. The anchor is a new Federal Courthouse, to replace the old Federal Courthouse that seemed perfectly good to me when I was delivering papers there for my father. I don't know. The sponsor of the bill is Richard Shelby who -- what a coincidence -- is the senior Senator from Alabama.

I'm not one for "revitalization" plans generally, since they usually wind up being nothing more than windfalls for companies that remodel -- and of course for the red-brick manufacturing industry. But Downtown Tuscaloosa has come a long way from when I was an undergrad student at the University a decade ago.