Post by prossman on Jan 6, 2009 9:12:38 GMT -7
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By BEN F. BRUCE
Special to the Star-Telegram
It’s beginning to look like Arlington may be getting ready for some of that old curse that says, "May you live in interesting times."
Arlington is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country with a population of more than 371,000 as of July 2007, which made it the 50th largest city in the U.S.
We already had some issues with traffic at peak times, and now, as many of our residents have personally experienced, the road construction, road closings, rerouting, detours and other traffic issues associated with the new Cowboys stadium are enough to make you crazy.
The problem is that even when all the stadium-related road construction is done, other infrastructure issues are going to become increasingly obvious.
For one thing, life in Arlington on football game days is going to be a madhouse. That new stadium can hold more than 80,000 people and those folks are second only to NASCAR for loving a good tailgate party. They’ll be coming early, staying late and drinking beer every day that the Cowboys are in town.
In addition to that, Jerry Jones is lining up other events for the offseason. I’ve heard that his objective is to have some kind of event in the stadium 50 out of 52 weeks of the year. And then, of course, we have Super Bowl XLV coming in 2011.
This is where the other infrastructure issues start to come in.
Arlington doesn’t have the four- and five-star hotels and restaurants necessary to support an event like the Super Bowl.
So where are the AFC and NFC Champion teams going to stay? The answer is Dallas or Fort Worth.
Where will the NFL officials and media folks stay, along with all the fans who want to catch a glimpse of their favorite players? Dallas or Fort Worth.
The bottom line is that if Arlington is to truly benefit from these types of events, we are going to need the infrastructure to support them, not just the arena.
Finally, we need to consider municipal services for those of us who live and work here.
What is all this going to do to the response times for police, fire and EMS? Police response times for Priority 1 calls for service, which require an immediate response, are already up to almost 11 minutes. That’s up nearly three minutes from just a few years ago. When bad things are happening to you, a lot can happen in 11 minutes.
Now think about what’s going to happen to those response times when they’re having some major event at the stadium and we’ve got a hundred or so police officers dedicated to trying to maintain security and manage all of the traffic going in and out of there.
We only have an authorized strength of 610 police officers in Arlington and that includes the chief — and that’s to cover the entire city around the clock.
The patrol bureau is the largest bureau in the Arlington Police Department, but you still have to have detectives, special operations, warrant officers, juvenile officers, gang officers and other operations that are required for a city Arlington’s size.
That means that you don’t have all 610 of those officers available to work the street and answer those calls for service because many of them are doing other essential jobs.
There is no question that we’re going to require more police, fire and EMS personnel to support the kind of city that Arlington is striving to become.
But we have to start working toward adding that personnel now, not a year from now when we’re already starting to "live in interesting times."
Ben F. Bruce is a resident of Arlington.
www.star-telegram.com/245/story/1124518.html
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