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ADOT wants to spend $80,600 of our hard earned tax dollars on homes for BATS????
I love vampire bats as much as anybody else, but I don't see any need for the Arizona Department of Transportation to spend $80,600 or our hard earned tax dollars building homes for bats!!!! New southern Arizona bridge to integrate bat roosts By Julia Tylor Cronkite News Service Mon Mar 11, 2013 9:35 PM MARANA -- In warm months, 30,000 bats sleep the day away under the bridge carrying Ina Road across the Santa Cruz River northwest of Tucson. As the sun sets, the bats emerge from tiny gaps between the concrete slabs supporting the span, creating an aerial spectacle that draws crowds. The community’s enthusiasm for the bats is one reason Janine Spencer, environmental-projects coordinator with the town of Marana, was concerned when the town and the Arizona Department of Transportation announced plans to replace the bridge and, by doing so, rid the migratory bats of their summer roost. “Unfortunately, the new bridges don’t have the crevices that bats need,” Spencer said. “We have so many old bridges in Tucson that are just fabulous bat habitat. But the new ones are flat-bottomed.” The Ina Road bridge has been deemed structurally unsound and will be replaced with two bridges, eastbound and westbound, with construction beginning in 2015. In an effort to reconcile the need for a new bridge with the potential loss of habitat, Marana and the Arizona Game and Fish Department will equip one of the spans with bat roosts. Spencer and other bat experts successfully requested funding for the project from Pima County’s Regional Transportation Authority. The structures, called bat condos, will be 14 inches deep and 48 inches long. They will contain crevices, similar to those found in the current bridge, that will vary in width from a half-inch to 1.5 inches to give bats a range of options. The nine roosts, to be installed under the eastbound bridge, will accommodate about 30,000 bats. Spencer has worked with engineers in Arizona and California to design the condos. “The usual thing that people can do in a lot of parts of the country is just hang up some bat boxes,” Spencer said. “We can’t really do that here because it’s too hot in the summer and it’s too cold in the winter. So we had to find something.” Of the $80,600 requested, the RTA so far has approved $30,500 for the first phase of the project, which will begin this summer. The money will come from the RTA’s $45 million Wildlife Linkages Fund, approved by Pima County voters in 2006, that is fed by a 0.5-cent transaction privilege tax. Beginning this summer, the Arizona Game and Fish Department will monitor the Ina Road bats for a year to ensure the bat condos mimic the animals’ current environment. The first phase will also include installation this fall of two smaller condos, each of which will house 2,000 bats, under the Cortaro Road bridge a mile north of Ina Road. The hope is that when the Ina Road bats are temporarily displaced by construction, the Cortaro Road condos will give some of them a place to roost. The second phase, starting with construction of the eastbound Ina Road bridge and the bat condos, is slated to begin in fall 2015. |