The City Secretary has certified the Trinity Petition to go to the voters! Dallas City Council Member Angela Hunt turned in over 80,000 signatures and at least 48,000 have been verified as good.

Barring legal challenges (which have not been ruled out) the vote, to determine whether or not a high-speed toll road will be built down the middle of the Trinity River, will be decided by voters.

The original improvements to the Trinity River, which was pitched to voters as an urban park--complete with sailboats and picnicking residents, was approved by voters in 1998.

To date, virtually nothing has been done--absent planning, re-planning and wrangling.

Hunt's petition drive may be instrumental, not only in getting the project back on track, but deciding how the park will be used.

Why did it take so long to count the ballots?

The process was completely manual.

The City Secretary scanned all of the ballots to images (or pictures) in a special file called a "PDF." Paid temporary workers (38 of them, according to the City Secretary's office) then began a manual process of looking at the pictures and trying to determine whether names on the petition matched those in Dallas County's voter registration files.

Dallas.Org received a quote (from a data entry firm) for $7,200 to enter the written information into a database. This process would have produced data that could have been used to match names, electronically, to voter registration data.

The process would have taken about a week to complete.

We have obtained a copy of the original PDF files and, should there be a legal challenge to Hunt's petition, we will produce an online database containing the names of every person--matched with the County's voter registration data.

What's next?

Watching how Craig Holcomb, and the city council, sell voters on a high-speed toll road down what was originally billed as one of the best urban parks in America!