Amy Traub
Nobody Thinks About It… Until the Streets Flood and the Power Goes Out
I was supposed to be in the nation’s capital yesterday. The Drum Major Institute honored Members of Congress who scored well on our 2008 middle-class scorecard, voting to strengthen and expand the nation’s middle class throughout the last year.
The problem is, I never made it there. I lost my means of transportation when a water main break in downtown Baltimore flooded the train tracks through the city. Amtrak suspended service from New York to D.C. My colleagues were lucky enough to catch a plane, and hosted an extremely successful event (more on that to come!) But I was stuck here in New York.
My small inconvenience pales before the tremendous disruption in the lives of Baltimore’s citizens and commuters. Businesses closed – some on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Electricity, water, phone, and internet service was shut down. Government offices shut their doors. And the whole thing was utterly predictable.
Many of Baltimore’s water and sewer pipes are more than a century old. The Baltimore Sun reports that the city has had to cope with more than 5,000 water main breaks in the last four years alone, although most have not been this disruptive. Baltimore knows it’s got to fix those pipes. In fact, the main that broke was on a list of priority repairs. But, like most cities, it can’t tackle the massive infrastructure investment alone. The cost of the city’s needed sewer and water repairs tops $2 billion. Without the cash to fix everything in advance, Baltimore ends up dealing with costly floods and power outages.
Languishing infrastructure projects like Baltimore’s crumbling water, sewer, and waste water systems are precisely the kind of shovel-ready jobs we might hope the federal stimulus package would pay for. It’s necessary work, after all, and would provide much needed jobs. That’s probably why Baltimore requested $700 million in stimulus money to get to work. Unfortunately, the Baltimore Sun reports, they only got $12 million. So the repairs proceed slowly, with ample opportunity for calamitous breakdowns like the one this week. Meanwhile, the city plans to hike water bills yet again on its dwindling tax base.
The problem may be, as my colleague Harry Moroz has written, that infrastructure spending just isn’t sexy enough. Or, in the words of Baltimore’s public works spokesman, talking about the city’s network of water pipes: “nobody thinks about it because nobody sees these things.” The immense need also highlights another point: in terms of both the economy and the needs of the American people, we could really use additional stimulus investments.
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Posted at 8:39 AM, Apr 30, 2009 in Infrastructure
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I don't think that it is lack of sexiness which leads our governments to ignore infrastructure maintenance.
My, somewhat dated, experience with public-sector-infrastructure spending differs from your analysis. Governments I've seen have been willing to sell tax-exempt bonds (for water and sewer, as in the Baltimore sewer line break your cite, for example)to undertake big capital projects. However, when called upon to maintain the built environment and infrastructure (with tax-levy dollars) deferred maintenance (not keeping stuff repaired) becomes the order of the day. Because local and state governments have been starved (our starved themselves) of tax revenue, the competition for maintenance dollars is fierce.
Posted by: Daniel Millstone | May 1, 2009 11:34 AM
Daniel, You're making the same very good point that Alon made in response to the last infrastructure post -- building new infrastructure is sometimes sexy, but maintaining it almost never is. I don't think this differs from my point so much as adding an additional dimension to it.
And I think you're right about the connection to revenue: I stand by my point that more stimulus spending is advisable, but it is also the case in many places that tax cuts at the city, state, and federal level are responsible for a lack of funds to invest in unsexy infrastructure maintenance. Politicians get glory for cutting taxes, or even for building shiny new infrastructure projects, but fixing a bunch of pipes no one can see and no one thinks about isn't much of a platform for reelection.
The idea of "green jobs" might offer one way to potentially change the political calculus: in Baltimore, for example, even the pipes that don't break do leak. It's a conservation nightmare of wastefully leaking water. Once you're talking about wasted resources, the (currently very sexy) idea of green jobs enters the picture. So I wonder if framing infrastructure maintenance as a green jobs issue makes it more politically palatable.
Posted by: Amy Traub | May 1, 2009 02:29 PM
This shit can be life threatening. I think all new yorkers remember the July 2007 gas line explosion in midtown. One guy driving a truck got horribly burned, and was lucky to be alive, much luckier than the victims of the Minnesota bridge collapse. We need infrastructure spending yesterday,
Posted by: hasan | May 4, 2009 01:16 AM