Infrastructure Crumbling is Buzzword for Wasting Tax Dollars

The infrastructure mantra was a bad joke before but with the stimulus, it is turning into a nightmare on the taxpayers.  I have an example in my own neighborhood.  We have a local small, earthen dam which holds back a one-time shallow farm pond from flooding the green belt behind us.  The Oklahoma Water Resources Board told the city that they had to remove the tall trees growing on the dam which I had wondered about for years.  That made sense.  That was the last of making sense.

The City asked for funding from stimulus money for infrastructure to fix the dam.  Lo and behold they are given either $200,000 or $250,000 or $300,000 depending on who you talk to in the city.  All this to remove two large trees?  Once they had the money in their hot little hands, the project has exploded.  The overflow from the dam on the east side of the dam that has worked for over half a century is no longer going to be used.  Instead they removed all vegetation including bushes that had roots less than one foot deep to turn this into huge project with a concrete runway for water that spills into the center of the green belt and leaves standing water. The contractor said it is up to the city to fix the standing water because his contract did not authorize him to go farther than the stakes which is at the bottom of the runway.

It is not over yet after months of work.  That concrete runway is much smaller then the brook area that was used before.  Now they are putting very large rocks on both sides of the runway to take the overflow water.  Use the term runway because it launches water into the center of the green belt where it is expected to run up hill to find its way down the green belt and under the street where it flows into another lake.  The people of this small community decades ago designed the overflow to run downhill all the way to the other lake.  They were smart enough to know that water runs downhill not uphill.  Maybe we should have stayed a separate entity from the large city that absorbed us.

The most disgusting part is the way it is touted as a grant from the Government and when confronted it is our tax dollars you get told "no it is not -- it is the federal government's. money" We have asked several peoiple where do you think the money from the Federal Government comes from and they go "Oh" or won't answer.   My neighbors and I have been talking and have decided that whoever is in charge is not a civil engineer or this wouldn't be happening.  If he is, he needs to go back to college because he has missed some major parts of being a civil engineer.

My neighbors on the green belt and I were never notified this was about to change our whole neighborhood until right before all the dirt and heavy equipment started being brought in to do the work.  Then they put a flyer on our door with little details.  Now we have two areas which will retain water on both sides of the dam which will be havens for the mosquito population. If you have ever heard of the 'Peter Principle,' it is alive and well in my city.

We are just one community where a small project bloomed into a months long expensive project thanks to infrastructure dollars of the stimulus when all they needed to do was remove two trees.  How much more waste is there?  We are betting billions not millions.  This was perfect timing for this article from Cafe Hayek as I hear the large trucks dumping rock now.  I am still waiting to find out how water is going to run up hill!

Crumbling
by Russ Roberts on September 5, 2011 

Whenever someone writes about infrastructure or bridges, they always use the word “crumbling” and say that we have neglected our infrastrucutre. We have to spend more, we’re told. 

It is good to remember this picture from David Leonhardt’s November 2008 column on infrastructure that shows that federal spending on infrastructure as a proportion of GDP was actually higher in 2008 than it had been any time since 1981.

Here is Leonhardt’s assessment of the problem. This, of course, is before the stimulus passed. But Leonhardt was prescient about the problems:

The House recently passed a bill that would allocate $18 billion for new construction projects. Barack Obama has signaled that he will sign a version of that bill and probably ask for tens of billions of dollars of additional spending to create badly needed jobs and help fix up America in the process. Money is going to start flowing. 

And yet when it comes to the nation’s infrastructure, money isn’t the main problem.
A lack of adequate financing is part of the problem, without doubt. But the bigger problem has been an utter lack of seriousness in deciding how that money gets spent. And as long as we’re going to stimulate the economy by spending money on roads, bridges and the like, we may as well do it right. 

It’s hard to exaggerate how scattershot the current system is. Government agencies usually don’t even have to do a rigorous analysis of a project or how it would affect traffic and the environment, relative to its cost and to the alternatives — before deciding whether to proceed. In one recent survey of local officials, almost 80 percent said they had based their decisions largely on politics, while fewer than 20 percent cited a project’s potential benefits.

There are monuments to the resulting waste all over the country: the little-traveled Bud Shuster Highway in western Pennsylvania; new highways in suburban St. Louis and suburban Maryland that won’t alleviate traffic; all the fancy government-subsidized sports stadiums that have replaced perfectly good existing stadiums. 

These are the Bridges to (Almost) Nowhere that actually got built. 

They help explain why our infrastructure is in such poor shape even though spending on it, surprisingly enough, has risen at a good clip in recent decades. 

Spending is up 50 percent over the last 10 years, after adjusting for inflation. As a share of the economy, it will be higher this year than in any year since 1981.
So if you talk to people who spend their lives studying infrastructure, you’ll hear two reactions to the attention that Mr. Obama, Nancy Pelosi and even some 

Republicans are now lavishing on the subject. The first is: Thank goodness. The second is: Please, please don’t just pour more money into the current system. 

“The system is fundamentally broken. We send a blank check and kind of hope for the best,” Robert Puentes, the infrastructure maven at the Brookings Institution, told me. “We need an extreme makeover.”

We’re always being told that we need to spend more money to fix the problem. That is much easier than fixing how the money is spent.
Source:  Cafe Hayek