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January 15, 2015

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Anyone who's lived here for any real amount of time knew this bust was looming. Sure, we hoped that the wildly unrealistic predictions for how long the boom would last might be remotely true, but true West Texans knew.

Perhaps what frustrates me most is that when the boom was mounting and certainly by the time it was a fever pitch, our communities should've been making the most of what they knew would be a fleeting opportunity to seriously overhaul the civic infrastructures.

Most notably, some (most?) of the key corridors in Odessa were anemic and insufficient even during the worst bust years. University Blvd, 8th St., and 2nd St. are, like it or not, the East/West corridors that many must use to traverse Odessa daily. Those streets should have been widened 2 decades ago. But certainly we should've seized the boom bucks to do so a year or two ago.

Likewise, some of the North/South corridors are just as logjammed. Grandview Ave., south of University is especially bad. Dixie isn't great either. Andrews Hwy/Grant bottlenecks south of 42nd very quickly and only gets worse as you travel towards downtown. Boom traffic made them much worse, but these streets were, again, bad 20 years ago.

The jackwagons who proclaimed that this boom would last anywhere between 17 -52 years need a swift kick in the nether regions. They either didn't believe their own implausible rhetoric or they just didn't feel the need to make improvements since traffic on Faudree is not bad.

Here in Midland we had the elected officials falling all over themselves to help built a skyscraper in the space occupied by the old courthouse.

When the developer couldn't lease enough space to justify the thing, that was a huge warning flag. Huge.

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