Mayor Leppert: “You know for a number of different reasons. First of all, there have been an awful lot of estimates that have been done. Those estimates build in contingencies and they keep the contingencies the same way they do as the others. Plus, there are certain things that we also know. We know that under this scenario, we own the land so we don’t have that cost. We know that under other scenarios, we don’t own the land and we’d have to acquire those. We know that there are environmental issues so you start putting in cost and you look at it on a relative basis.”

DB: A lot of what has caused the cost increase in the current proposal has been the fact that the road has been put in a floodway, would you agree with that?

ML: “No, the biggest increase in cost has been the delays. Without a question, it has been the delays.”

DB: Haven’t a lot of the delays been because of the engineering problems associated with putting the road in a floodway?

ML: “What I can do is relate and again, it’s important to note I am not one…I have never voted for this in terms of being on the council or anything else. I have never designed any pieces of it so I come in as someone who should be one of the more objective people looking at this. So I start from that perspective. Everybody that I talked to -- I visited with the Corps, I visited with TxDOT and I visited with the NTTA -- is comfortable that it works. Everyone is comfortable that everything you’ve seen are accurate interpretations of what to expect.”

DB: It appeared to me that the road was on the levee in parts of the NTTA video.

ML: “No. Absolutely not and it’s not. In fact, on all of those [points to NTTA drawings] you can see if you look closely, and again it depends on the angle and if you look at it…you would see a white line which is signification of the gravel work that is on top of the levee. I would tell you, the amount of work that has gone in…I think they had 80 different people working on the first one [video] that you saw. I mean, the excruciating attention to detail…Now, can I tell you that one tree is misplaced? Yeah, that’s probably going to happen. But I can tell you there has been a enormous amount of work by TxDOT, NTTA, the Corps of Engineers and everybody to make sure that all the different pieces, all the proportions and all the representations are accurate.”

DB: What about the idea of keeping Angela Hunt completely out of the Trinity River Project Committee when making the committee decisions? 

ML: “That was a call that I had to make and I did try to read the entire council. In this case, you have an issue where 14 of 15 different people are aligned with it and what I felt was important there was to reflect the council in total. I’d also tell you there is not one committee meeting that is being handled that any one of the council members can’t go to and participate.”

DB: What about the idea that she has no leadership position whatsoever and is the only one left out?

ML: “The Trinity Committee, because of the issues, I had to do things differently on that so put that aside. On the other six core or standing committees, what I tried to say is I wanted to have the chairman be a returning person and also someone that had been intimately involved with that issue. Mitch Rasansky has been a past chair. Elba Garcia has been a past chair. Pauline Medrano has been a past chair. Ron Natinsky has been a past chair. Then I specifically wanted to have a succession plan in place so I took a new council person and put them as the vice-chair. It also made it easy to be truthful with you -- to be able to say here is my criteria so I didn’t have a new person ask me why didn’t I get that done. When I got to the Trinity Committee, I wanted to make sure that two things happened. One, I reflected the council. So I did make the conscious decision that I would not put Angela in a leadership position on that [committee] or on the committee [at all]. But then what I also said is I wanted to have the chairman of that be someone whose district is touched by it, who all of the sudden, their district was intimately involved in the decision. David came to me very early on and expressed an interest and that’s where I did flip it.”

DB: What about the fact that you doubled up with Dr. Garcia [giving her a chair and vice-chair position]?

ML: “I had to double up on Elba because I felt that committee [the Trinity River Project Committee] had to reflect where the council was going in total. So when I did that, then I had to draw Elba as the vice-chair because I had to duplicate some place if I was going to have people that fell in that 14 people that wanted to see the Trinity go forward. That’s the logic that I got to. I can be criticized and people can see it different ways and that’s fine, but I just had to make the call.”

DB: What about the idea of waiting so long [to make the committee decisions]?

ML: “That was always my intent going in. That was my intent for the first day. I wanted to play through most of the budget process. I also wanted to be able to see people so I could get a chance to visit with them, see them in action and make the appropriate judgments. I knew all the people, but I hadn’t seen them in action and I didn’t bring a background of being at City Hall for the last 20 years. That was very much intentional. In fact, if anything, I did it a week earlier than I thought I would do it. But it was pretty close to the time frame that I wanted to.”

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