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Our Opinions There's an old saying, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." We think of the phrase often when we are reviewing old copies of The Democrat for the "From Our Files" feature that runs on the facing page. This week, we were amused- and a little saddened but not really surprised- to look back 70 years ago and find our highway woes haven't changed much. Then Editor and Publisher George Carleton wrote in an editorial about the paving of the last stretch of highway between Gulf Shores and Fort Morgan. When it was completed, Carleton wrote, there would be only 17 miles of roads left unpaved in Baldwin County. The article didn't specify, but we would guess that meant state roads...surely not every trail was paved. "What a contrast with Clarke, in which it all remains to be paved!" Carleton observed. Only short stretches within the towns of Grove Hill and Jackson were paved, the rest were gravel and dirt. Even Highway 5, then a major north-south route, was unpaved but Carleton wrote that there was some talk of paving it. Of course, there was no Highway 84 in 1937, no major east-west route through the county. River bridges had been built at Jackson and Claiborne but a ferry was still in use at Coffeeville. "Road building isn't determined upon the merit of a proposition but upon political affiliation and political pull," the 1937 editorial observed. "It is high time this section was receiving some consideration from the State Highway Department. It has been a stepchild long enough." Indeed, we are as much a stepchild today, 70 years later, as we were in 1937. Highway 43 is four-laned from Mobile to Thomasville today thanks almost entirely to the work of Joe McCorquodale when he was a local legislator and then Speaker of the House. Without his single-handed persistence, it might still be mostly a two-laned road. Saddly, "Mr. Joe" has been out of office too many years. In recent weeks, U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby and Congressman Jo Bonner have visited Grove Hill and each time they received requests for help with four-laning Highway 84. Congressman Bonner helped to secure $8 million in federal study funds for 84 and says he is committed to finding more. Sen. Shelby's stock answer is that he sends a lot of transportation money home to Alabama but it is the Alabama Department of Transportation that needs to be petitioned for a fair share of it. We tend to agree with him. Which brings us to an observation made by a friend from east Alabama this past weekend who knows a little about how the transportation department works and even more about the workings of Alabama politics. Aware of southwest Alabama's efforts to get some work done on 84 on the west side of the state where the route bottlenecks into a two-laned road (east Alabama is four-laned and all of Mississippi's 84 soon will be), our friend relayed that we are "just barking up a tree" and that there are no plans to put money into 84 on this side of the state anytime soon. This friend, who realizes the importance of four-laning the route from the Georgia line to the Mississippi line, suggested that southwest Alabama has to really "raise cain" if anything is to be done. Our friend is right. We need to camp out on the doorstep of the State Capitol and of the Alabama Department of Transportation for ever how long it takes to get this important project rolling. And we need to continue to lobby our federal representatives in Washington, too.
If we don't, a new generation of southwest Alabamians will be reading more of the same in "From Our Files" features decades from now.
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