The City of Middleton just voted to spend another $60,000 on their TIGER project. I first wrote about the TIGER (Transportation Improvements Generating Economic Recovery) project back in August where I questioned whether or not they’ve really thought the long term costs through. Specifically I asked whether it was really too much ask that we take care of present business, present debt, before jumping into expensive, new projects we have no money and no plan for?

Well, I guess so. Consider that they had committed to $40,000 in consulting fees and missed that figure - even before anything is built. Not just by a little either. Missing this figure by $60,000 makes you wonder how the $4.3 million expenditure planned for this project is going to work out. If they’ve been as accurate as they were on the initial estimate, they’ll only need another $6.4 million or so to wrap this up – that’s a total of $10.7 million. I don’t want to consider if the overall estimate was done worse than this initial one was.  Perhaps they have a plan but it isn't looking like a good one.

To be fair, several aldermen voiced concerns about needing to throw more money in so soon but they were essentially trapped by the previous vote to start this whole boondoggle. At some point though we can hope a majority will realize that throwing more good money after bad isn’t going to solve this.