It’s never been an ambition of mine to master the ways and means of transportation finance. And I certainly have not. But at the moment, if the collapse of the 35W bridge is to be the takeoff point for a fresh look at taxing and spending issues, it may be necessary to master a few basics, so that we can at least try to be faithful to the facts rather than commanding the facts to be faithful to our ideological needs.
Here’s one such fact: The federal government pays 80 percent of the cost of building an interstate highway (it was 90 percent in the early days of the program). Tthe state pays the other 20 percent.
But the feds pay little of the cost of maintenance and repair. That’s fundamentally a state responsibility. Hold that thought for one second.
Here’s a second fact: The feds pass big transportation and transit authorization bills about every six years. They have weird names. The current one, passed by overwhelming margins in 2005 and signed by Pres. Bush, is called SAFETEA-LU (okay, wipe that smirk off, it stands for the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users). Anyway, the big winners in SAFETEA-LU were Arizona and Minnesota, which got buckets of federal cash for road and transit projects, 46 percent higher than they had in the previous six-year plan (if you must know, it was known to its friends as TEA-21).
So Minnesota is relatively brimming with federal transportation money during the reign of SAFETEA-LU, which runs through 2009, and the money is to build new roads and rail projects, not patch up old ones. My takeaway from this is that Bush Administration stinginess has little to do with the bridge collapse.
But on the same day that I became acquainted with SAFETEA-LU (and Minnesota’s good fortune under same) I came across this piece by Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress, headlined “Consequences of Disinvestment.”
Lilly does acknowledge right away that we don’t know why the Mpls. bridge fell. And he spends half the piece talking about two other infrastructure problems, wastewater treatment facilities and drinking water that he says are being neglected because of Bush’s determination to starve domestic spending while showering money on the Pentagon. Lilly may have the goods on that point as regards the twin water issues. I’m fully prepared to believe him because I certainly do have the impression that Bush’s spending priorities are heavily pro-military and anti- most other things.
But that’s just the trouble. There are serious factual barriers to blaming Bush for the bridge collapse, yet Lilly certainly does blame him by implication bordering on outright statement. Certainly Lilly never goes near acknowledging either of the two key facts above.
Advocacy is fine. And Lilly, a longtime aide to congressional Democrats and committees, is now with an outright liberal advocacy group. But intellectual honesty requires that one acknowledge the key facts, even when they are inconvenient to the case one wants to make.
Because I know just enough to know that Lilly is giving me a highly selective tour of the facts, I can’t help but wonder whether I can trust Lilly’s discussion of the implications of Bush’s niggardliness for other infrastructure problems.
(I have a call in to Lilly, and will write about his reply if I hear from him.)
The Lilly piece is an example of a concept I recall reading about years ago in Harper’s (can’t find much trace of it online, iId love to reread it and see if it’s as brilliant as I recall) called the “resonant chord.”
In advertising or political persuasion, it’s hard to convince people of an assertion that is inconsistent with what they already believe. But if some form of the pre-existing belief is already in the audience’s mind, the propagandist need only pluck that chord of belief and allow it to resonate, and the audience will fill in the rest of the argument.
Since most of the audience believes Bush’s misplaced spending priorities are undermining America, it’s easy (but misleading) to use the bridge as the latest example.
This is one reason that Gov. Pawlenty is serious danger of taking mortal political damage from the bridge collapse. Maintaining bridges in Minnesota is his responsibility. He has been a no-new-taxes Republican. He did veto two gas tax increases that would have raised money that could have been used for bridge maintenance. His bridge people did know about serious problems with this bridge. These facts create a chord that is very prepared to resonate to the idea that Pawlenty is responsible for the disaster.
The picture of the bridge and the cars and the people in the river strums that chord. The burden of proof in such cases may be very low.
The political threats seem real, considering the warlike “anything goes” atmosphere of political discourse of the past several years.
The relevant question, it appears to me, is whether inspectors were using best practices, not minimum regulation required practices, when checking bridges in Minnesota. If they were not, why not, and who made those decisions.
Bad inspections, whether technically correct or not, prevent proper planning and political action, and cry out for criticism and prompt reform.
Is it really responsible to set up a system that delivers new toys without paying for the maintenance? Why did the feds set up a system that had no money for maintenance? Even if you tell the states they’re supposed to take care of their new toys, who really believes that the temptation to get more new toys won’t win out over taking care of that which we’ve already got?
Now (even before the new 35W project became a necessity) we’re on a building binge to create more new stuff that we can’t afford to take care of, since we can’t even afford to take care of that which we already have. When do we stop and realize that we shouldn’t build when we can’t commit to caring for it?
Apparently there is a new poll out showing Pawlenty receiving high marks across the political spectrum for his handling of the bridge collapse. I think the funding distinction will not be well understood by most to harm Pawlenty especially since he quickly flipped his stand on the gas tax. That will be seen as a positive for him not as a flip-flop and people will not think about the fact that he vetoed previous increases designated for maintenance. There’s too much noise right now for that message to sink in and it is certainly not being covered in the MSM. I don’t think he’s going to suffer mortal political damage.
I have two great concerns when it comes to transportation issues, and I believe that these relate directly to the bridge collapse.
The first is in finance, which Eric admits he doesn’t understand. I have been poking at transportatioin funding for years, and I have yet to meet anyone who is willing to say that they do. Some people get the highway part of it, which is about 2/3, but no one understands the intricate web of agencies and funding that, together, put a few bucks into a pot here or there to make the roads we drive on. To me, this is very disturbing, because there cannot be any accountability in a “system” like this.
The other issue is also related to accountability, as I don’t know who is really in charge most of the time. Nearly everything is farmed out to consultants, who dutifully file large reports at the end of their contract. Who is in the store ready to act on this information? I’ve seen the inspection reports - some done by MnDOT, some farmed out - and if you add them up it’s very obvious that this bridge was a very serious problem. Whose job was it to do something about this information? How many other bridges did they have on their plate? A revolving door of consultants may give you a lot of information, but if no one is in charge there will be no action on it.
There is little doubt in my mind that MnDOT is stretched to the limits. The way money flies around it’s hard to tell just how much of this is from starvation and how much is mismanagement. The deal wih the Feds is one that has been with us for 50 years across 50 states, and I can’t see that as a particularly big issue by itself. We do some things differently here, and have since about the Carlson administration. Let’s start with that, and if it doesn’t provide answers we can compare notes with Iowa and Wisconsin to see how we all feel about the Feds.
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I think your second “fact” is irrelevant to the argument you are trying to make. Nor does it tell us anything. So MN got 46% more in the most recent round of budgeting for new roads? Compared to what? A 46% increase could still leave the state in last place among 50 states. How would I know? Likewise, saying that MN is “relatively brimming” with transportation money tells us nothing. Maybe millions were allocated for the building of a bridge halfway across Lake of the Woods.
And maybe it’s true that it is primarily a state responsibility to maintain roads, but it’s also true that the billions that have been squandered in Iraq could have been allocated instead to pressing national concerns, including tending to a crumbling infrastructure.
The point of Lilly’s piece is that the Congress has been trying to convince the President to increase funding for infrastructure repair and he doesn’t want to spend money for this. So while it is true he can’t be blamed for the bridge collapse, his spending priorities have contributed to a national problem that makes this kind of disaster more likely.