Let’s Hear It for Infrastructure Maintenance!

 (By Guy Heston.)

Americans seem to take our infrastructure for granted. Turn on the faucet and here comes the water. Flick a switch and on come the lights. The gas company will make sure you are warm in the winter. We expect everything to work with nothing more to think about than paying the monthly bill, which we gripe about but pay anyway to keep the lights and heat on, and with precious little thought about what has to go on to make all of the infrastructure function.

We are making a mistake with this thought. Infrastructure requires ongoing investment and maintenance to keep everything working. It doesn’t happen magically, and if we don’t pay for it through our utility bills, taxes and programs to help those less fortunate keep the lights on, we will suffer the consequences—blackouts, worse floods and fire damage, roads in disrepair, more unhoused people because they can’t pay the bill and so forth. Yes, there will always be natural disasters such as the recent fire in Maui and Category 3 hurricane in Florida, but well built and maintained infrastructure can often greatly lessen the damage and heartbreak.

I worked in public transportation for three decades and was always amazed by elected officials’ lack of interest in infrastructure maintenance. I could always find federal grants to fund new buses, transit centers, customer amenities and the like, and it was a given that we had to have a public event to celebrate the arrival of new buses or the opening of a new transit center, where elected officials could talk about what had been accomplished for the community and show off shiny new stuff. Great photo opportunities for the press.

Maintenance of such infrastructure was another matter, and in my experience a topic that politicians found about as interesting as watching an egg boil.  When I would explain the importance of keeping up the infrastructure the taxpayers had invested in, slightly glazed eyes seemed to be the order of the day. There was even a rule (since thankfully modified), that federal transit funds could not be spent on maintenance. More than once I was told by an elected official that operational expenses for a new project was my problem, not theirs.

When each fiscal year I would draft our transit system's proposed budget, my first order of business was to talk to the maintenance staff. What do we need to keep things running? Resealed shop floors, reupholstering of bus seats, that sort of thing. Nothing sexy about it but kept things running in a good state of order. And for newly proposed capital projects I learned to ask how we were going to keep said projects well maintained. Some of them were cancelled because I didn’t get a good answer.

I was once asked to participate in a focus group on the strategic future of the California State University. The faculty members of the group, rightly so, talked about the importance of student outcomes and investing in faculty. When it came my turn to comment I said it was also important to invest in the maintenance of the 23 CSU campuses infrastructure. I proffered that we were sitting in a lovely classroom near the grassy, tree lined campus quad and that it took money to keep everything functioning so the faculty could teach and the students learn. Based on the quizzical looks I received you would have thought I had just landed from Mars. The faculty members looked at me with the interest of watching an egg boil.  I glanced at the chief facilities officer of the university who was also participating in the group and we exchanged slight smiles and kept quiet.

So here is my proposal. Let’s make our nation’s infrastructure maintenance glamorous. A newly resurfaced road with Beyonce dancing on it in a TikTok video? Barbie sitting in a bus with new seats and a refurbished engine (yes, well maintained buses are needed during an emergency evacuation)? Harry Styles showing off a new maintenance shop floor? I realize that none of this is likely to happen, but perhaps it is time to reimagine our nation’s approach to infrastructure and remind our elected officials that decide on the use of taxpayer dollars that maintenance may not be glamorous but is critical in everyday life and even more so when a natural disaster strikes. Well maintained roads, water systems, power grids,  public transit buses and the like keep our collective lives running.

Sexy, no. Needed, yes.

###

U.S.A. -- Election 2014: Congratulations, Republicans! (Now what?)

In all sincerity:  Congratulations to the Republican Party for its success in yesterday's elections.

It's only fair to say so.

Also, it's only fair to say that there's always another election in another two years.

The truth--and this is disappointing to me (not a surprise to most readers)--is that the Democratic brand just did not sell well to yesterday's voters.  The Republicans created and sold a more appealing brand.

The election results will be parsed and re-parsed intensively over the next few weeks, so this posting isn't going to go into things like how Republican voters tend to have a better turnout than do Democratic voters in mid-term elections, or how President Obama's approval ratings did one thing or another.  Lots will be said about that, and you'll read it elsewhere in great detail if you care to do so; maybe you already have.  I suppose that most all of those things are true; what really matters for the future is how true they will be come the next election.

After all, there's another election coming in two years.

But there's just one little numbers-parsing that I will indulge in here and now:  voter turnout.  As I am writing this I have seen no overall analysis of turnout for this election, but I imagine that it's pretty low.

Case in point:  California's election for governor.  It looks like just over 5 million votes were cast in total for Jerry Brown--the Democratic incumbent and winner--and Neel Kashkari, the Republican challenger; those two being the only choices for governor on the ballot.  Let's be charitable and add in a few thousand additional votes that might have been made without including a choice for governor, and allow for the fact that not all the votes have been counted yet, and let's say that 6 million Californians voted in yesterday's election.

Does that sound like a lot of votes?  It is, but consider that California has about 18 million registered voters, with about 24 million people who are eligible to vote (out of a total state population of around 38 million).

Which means that Mr. Brown has won an unprecedented fourth term as governor by less than one quarter of the state's residents who could have, and should have, voted.

We get the government we vote for -- or maybe it's the one we don't vote for.

And there'll be another chance to do this again in two years.  Not for California governor, of course; that will be in four years, and Jerry Brown will not be running for reelection again because he's reached his legal limit (besides, he'll be 80 years old then, and I presume he will have better things to do with his time than campaign for elected office. . .not that he spent much time campaigning for this election).

Are California voting patterns representative of the nation as a whole?  In some ways, no they are not, and in other ways, yes they are.  Politically, the state seems to slide leftish, although that could be argued simply by noting that two of the last four governors have been Republican, and two have been Democratic.  But when it comes to the urge to vote, I suspect that there are some pretty compelling laws of large numbers that suggest the state's voter turnout for this last election is representative of the nation overall.

In other words, both the Democratic and the Republican parties now have just two years to develop and implement some kind of compelling message to deliver to the other three-quarters of the nation's potential voters, because the winners in the next election ought to be--and probably will be--decided by some numbers from yesterday's non-participating three-quarters.

Speaking of California -- yesterday's election results have set the state up as a potential national poster child for the benefits--or shortcomings, depending on how things work out--of spending public monies on infrastructure projects.  Proposition 1, authorizing $7.5 billion in bond sales for water-related projects, was easily approved by voters.  Also, Governor Brown is on the record as saying that he will stoke the boilers on the state's high-speed rail effort so that the project will soon have a full head of steam.  (Can't help myself; I like trains.)  That one is commonly quoted as having a $62 billion price tag.

Only a fraction of those amounts will be spent over the next two years, but that could still end up being worth a few billion dollars.  It will be interesting--to say the least--to see what it means for California's economy, and then make comparisons with Kansas, for example, where the deeply conservative state government has been indulging itself in extreme austerity, and looks likely to continue that practice for the near-term future.  It could end up being a national political message.  Perhaps it will even be compelling, which would be an important thing.

Because there's another election two years from now.