I’ve blogged about how unpredictable fuel prices and the collapse of the “sub-prime starter home” distant suburban cookie-cutter communities are pushing people back towards the cities. In fact, the vast majority of Americans live in cities (or their immediate environs). And just about anybody in Any-City, USA can tell you about the potholes, failing concrete foundations on bridges and tunnels, the cracked streets and sidewalks. Failing dams, leaking levees, and ancient pipes (particularly on the eastern part of the country) add to this mass of failing infrastructure and deferred maintenance (from contracting state and local budgets) disasters.
So all of the 50 states, given a June 30 deadline to submit projects for the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the big stimulus bill), were on time to sip at the federal trough, an initial installment of $16.4 billion. Are the states addressing these pressing urban issues, fixing what we have before we lose it or… something else? Yeah, something else. When you have a state, deciding about how to allocate federal money, it seems necessary to spread the wealth around to all of the relevant constituencies… not to solve the obvious and immediate problems.
“Oh no,” you squeal, “the government can’t be sacrificing the greater good for the people simply to appease the political ambitions”? You sound as jaded as I do. Funny, I bet you know where this is going before I get there, and there is shame in that fact. The New York Times (July 8th) noted that the 100 largest cities, with the greatest infrastructure problem (and with 2/3 of the American population and responsible for 75% of the nation’s economy), are getting around half of the stimulus package in this round of expenditures.
The Times: “‘If we’re trying to recover the nation’s economy, we should be focusing where the economy is, which is in these large areas,’ said Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, which advocates more targeted spending. ‘But states take this peanut-butter approach, taking the dollars and spreading them around very thinly, rather than taking the dollars and concentrating them where the most complex transportation problems are.’ … [T]he projects [that were approved] … offered vivid evidence that metropolitan areas are losing the struggle for stimulus money. Seattle found itself shut out when lawmakers in the State of Washington divided the first pot of stimulus money. Missouri has directed nearly half its money to 89 small counties which, together, make up only a quarter of the state’s population…
“Cleveland was initially promised $200 million of Ohio’s stimulus money to help build a five-lane bridge to replace the 50-year-old Innerbelt Bridge, which is so deteriorated that officials banned heavy truck traffic on it last fall. But state officials, worried about meeting federal deadlines, took back $115 million in stimulus money and decided to use it on shovel-ready projects elsewhere.” Why are we building new projects when it is clear that without some immediate major retrofitting and repair, we are going to lose the value of billions if not trillions of dollars of earlier infrastructure investments? And why are we spending disproportionate money on rural infrastructural matters when the country clearly needs a different priority?
About half the money is targeted for road repair, one tenth for bridge replacement or repair, but there is this “cart-horse” thing. And if you want quick job-creation, perhaps even sustainable jobs, there is nothing like maintaining and fixing what we already have. Not that there isn’t a place for new infrastructure; it’s just a question of priorities and avoiding satisfying political mandates at the expense of doing what we need to rebuild an ailing nation.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.
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