STIMULUS CONSTRUCTION COULD START TOMORROW

Stimulus infrastructure will not take 18 months to begin. Apparently, the right wing talking points on the Sunday talk shows included telling the American people that infrastructure improvement was bad economic stimulus because public works projects take so long to create jobs. David Brooks of the New York Times says any investment in Infrastructure will take 13 years. I am a transportation engineer and I can assure you any infrastructure monies provided to the states could be used yesterday. My state has approximately 600 million dollars worth of projects effectively ready to go to bid and 200 million to do it with. If half of that money was labor (the other half being materials) the shortfall would represent 100,000 man hours at $20.00 per hour. Beyond a general “philosophical” resistance to public works projects, the wingers are out of touch with the state of the infrastructure and it’s funding in the United States. 

Infrastructure funding at the state level is a train wreck or bridge collapse going somewhere to happen. Many states have seen level funding since the mid-ninties. What this means to the traveling public is roads in disrepair and bridges that need round the clock attention. It’s all because your local department of transportation has dealt with the same price increases everyone else has. When oil prices triple, so do most of the materials used to build roads and bridges. Many state departments of transportation have about 37 percent of the buying power they had twenty years ago.

Twenty years ago, a state could fix the roads, bridges and build new capacity to alleviate traffic with what was left. Those days are long gone. In order to match federal funds owed the states (this money was sent from the state in the form of an 18 cent gas tax) states have embarked on construction of new facilities. What this means is Road and bridge inspection and maintenance are on shoestring budgets. What happens is much like getting preventive care versus going to the hospital with an acute disease.  A few cheap maintenance items left undone today fester into projects to rebuild a road or bridge later. The efficiencies demanded by the public in maintenance issues are becoming a bigger and bigger risk. With budgets so tight, one slip up can result in a tragedy like the Interstate 35 Bridge in Minnesota.

To prevent a tragedy, I hope the incoming Obama Administration will consult the chief engineers of the state departments of transportation directly. If the President-Elect does this, his infrastructure stimulus monies will immediately go to work. If he listens to the WONKS on the Sunday shows, the earmark prone congress or a dysfunctional Federal Highways Administration upper management, his money might begin to work sometime in 2015.

The author apologizes about the sabbatical. The 27 month old HP laptop responsible for this blog had a hard drive attack. As usual the computer had a 24 month warranty. The drive has been replaced by mail order and, Incidentally, I highly recommend this method. I have replaced the drive and am back in business.