Government is Responsible for the Sorry State of our Roads and Bridges
By William Shughart • Monday November 9, 2009 10:38 AM PDT • 4 Comments
Steel girders crashing down on commuters crossing the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge; drivers killed in Minneapolis as an overwater link on a major interstate highway collapsed underneath them; hundreds of people drowned in New Orleans as levees supposedly designed to protect the city from catastrophic flooding were overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge.
There is an evident pattern here – and it can be traced directly to federal, state and local government’s failure to devote both its attention and taxpayers’ money to the mundane and largely invisible job of maintaining the nation’s infrastructure as opposed to “investing” it in more politically rewarding economic development projects.
“We never talked about levees”, as one member of New Orleans’s Levee Board later admitted. Predictably more responsive to the parochial interests of developers, realtors, financial institutions and other local special-interest groups, Louisiana’s levee district boards deliberately expanded their bureaucratic fiefdoms far beyond their original mandates. Over time, using its powers of eminent domain for flood-control projects, the governing board of New Orleans’s Levee District became the largest landlord at Lake Pontchartrain. It built two marinas there, constructed parks, walking paths and other amenities along the lakefront and, in order to spur development at the sites it helped finance, built roads, a commuter airport, and a dock leased to the Belle of Orleans, a floating casino, in return for a cut of the expected gaming revenue. New Orleans’s district board also considered, but ultimately abandoned, a plan to lay fiber-optic cable along 26 miles of the city’s levee system. The humdrum job of flood-control maintenance took a backseat to more newsworthy lakefront development initiatives.
As a result of that neglect, sections of the levee along the Industrial Canal, where a major breach occurred, was built around a steel floodwall that had no horizontal footing, was surrounded by protective pilings that may not have been driven deeply enough to provide stability, was compromised further by seepage underneath its base, and consequently was simply pushed aside by Katrina’s storm surge, creating an opening so large that a river barge was swept through it.
Bureaucrats in California’s Bay Area, Minneapolis, New Orleans and elsewhere can afford to roll the dice on your behalf – and evade responsibility for the ensuing failure of roads, bridges and dams – because they likely will have left public office before people are injured or killed as a result of their bypassing of needed repairs.
The nation’s infrastructure is deteriorating, but one should be cautious in supporting the spending of economic “stimulus” money to mend it. Tax revenue will by and large be earmarked for financing much more visible “shovel-ready” projects. Politicians garner a greater electoral payoff from financing new construction projects than from fixing potholes or the supports of aging bridges. Further headlines of bureaucratic death and destruction surely will follow.
Tags: Budget and Tax Policy, California, Privatization, Socialism, Transportation 
Government’s responsibility? Who, exactly, in this constitutional republic, constitutes the government?
Go look in the mirror.
Now, people such as Mr. Shugart have a full time job keeping an eye on government officials and functionaries. And, no individul citizen can keep up with more than a tiny fraction of the activities of government. But when entertainment takes up hours of each day, and the public meetings called by the agencies attract only the business interests that stand to profit by whatever the meeting is concerned with, and no citizens, who will be the ones paying and being benefited or damaged, who is to blame for the failures of the people who carryout the functions of the government?
I have seen meetings called after hours, when many people who should be interested are off work, and still no one but the business interests that hope to profit show up, the officials are told by their inaction that no one cares. Football, drinking, kicking around, is more important, they suppose, and they are missing the entertainment themselves, so why should they bother? Usually they are not paid any extra for holding meetings off hours.
If one person out of a thousand had taken any interest in the levee management, the politicians and bureaucrats might have acted differently, like if anyone cares.
Only when the meeting had to do with some handout, like social security, do a large number of citizens show up.
Al Grayson | Nov 10, 2009 | Reply
Of course there should never have been any building on known flood plain. New Orleans has been made a swamp several times since its founding. Flooding is no surprise there.
Why should the rest of us subsidize building on known flood plains? The entire Mississippi delta was one big swamp before levees were built and the swamp drained.
If businesses find that there is enough profit in locating facilities on flood plains, occasional flooding cleanup can be factored into the cost of doing business. Egyptian farmers found for thousands of years that the reward of farming on flood plains was worth the trouble of cleanup and repairs of whatever facilities they had on land that flooded every year. I doubt that they built their granaries on the flood plain. Today, it seems that people treat the rather predictable flooding of flood plains as an unexpected disaster, and then expect the rest of us to pay for their rebuilding in the same places.
Al Grayson | Nov 10, 2009 | Reply
Al Grayson, name taken from the socialist rep and vice chair of the congressional progressive caucus, or the actual rep himself. You were hired by the people to take care of the people’s business! You are paid good money out of the public purse and you have been given the trust of the people you have sworn to represent. How dare you, sir, try to lay the blame back on your constituents? You are all bought and paid for, caring not one whit for the people you supposedly represent. You and your ilk have sold your souls for 30 pieces of silver. Trying to shift the blame from your selfish and cowardly actions will get you nothing but scorn.
Bill | Nov 11, 2009 | Reply