U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao today announced that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will award $986 million in airport infrastructure grants, the fifth allotment of the total $3.18 billion in Airport Improvement Program (AIP) funding for airports across the United States. Lovell Field, Chattanooga will receive $2,439,132 to expand Taxiway C.
Across the State Line
More than a century in the making, the 234-mile (376-kilometer) Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway was supposed to fulfill a dream of “orderly growth and prosperity” when it opened in 1985, snaking its way through the poor, rural Deep South. It hasn’t worked out that way. Delayed for decades by environmental concerns and detractors who called the project a boondoggle, the $2 billion shipping shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico — best known as the Tenn-Tom, or more derisively, the “big ditch” — has never come close to traffic projections used to sell it to the public, and poverty rates have increased in most of the counties it flows through in Mississippi and Alabama.
