There is also a lesson in there about endless chasing of technical details instead of going straight to the source of all mysteries: power and the people that hold it.
Many software challenges can be looked at through the same lens. Why is this project even a thing and why, o, why is it $25M over budget and getting nowhere? (Hint: nothing technical)
Also just as a practical matter: Professionals are required to track the money and engineering, so there's bound to be a paper trail. No one has a good reason to write down the "why" unless it's a cool story to retell. Even then, the details behind the story wouldn't be included.
Just keeping a bunch of boxes with papers around is quite useless without knowing why they exist in the first place.
He could have just been bribed by the superhighway folks and ignored his constituents, and maybe they would have sucked it up ...