Kentucky BFF’s Jerry Abramson and Steve Beshear (Louisville mayor and Kentucky state governor, respectively) have released their picks for a five-person board of negotiators charged with the task of destroying downtown Louisville for the next several decades and taking southern Indiana along for the ride. I’m talking, of course, about the Ohio River Bridges Project, that gargantuan $4.1 billion mess that promises to put more cars, congestion and concrete in our city than ever before while yielding the most marginal of benefits.

However, what seems to be overlooked is that the project has officially taken its first step toward fruition even as conflicting data shows that the ORBP, as it is, lacks support from most Metro Louisville residents and will be little more than a grossly expensive mistake requiring further remedies down the road, all without addressing the city’s more fundamental transportation concerns.

It should be doubly unsettling for Louisvillians aware of not only the ORBP’s inherently negative consequences — destroying swaths of historically preserved Butchertown, turning our urban core into a nightmare construction zone for 20+ years, kneecapping the nascent downtown renaissance, et al. — but whom are also familiar with the sleaker, cheaper and infinitely more economical alternative.

Yet due to entrenched interests and the inertia of business-as-usual, the alternative has been groundlessly attacked by the city’s media and political apparatuses despite popular citywide support for many of its tenets. But I guess that’s just good old-fashioned progress for you — especially so if the board members turn out to be nothing more than Kentucky-fried cronies. So tip your hat to the Commonwealth’s BFFs: They’re off to a smashing start.