We don’t exist. We are like the sound that a tree makes when it falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it. We may be making a lot of noise for the other trees to hear but no real people are hearing what we say.
I just read another article about “The impending public works infrastructure train wreck” in the APWA Reporter. The author correctly focuses on the under-investment in public facilities that has been going on for a long time. But the article is in the APWA Reporter which means that people like you and me are the only ones reading it. Actually, people like me because most people don’t read all the technical journals and magazines that they subscribe to.
Every once in a while some organization will issue a report to the general public about the sad condition of public works in this country. And no one pays much attention to it. I recently read a comparison of the three presidential candidates and where they stand on the important issues facing America. Public infrastructure wasn’t even on the list. Rebuilding America doesn’t seem to be on any political agenda.
There’s a good reason for this. When Ross Perot was running for president, he pulled out his graphs and charts and showed that a 50 cent increase in the federal gas tax would actually save money because of all the road improvements funded by the increased tax. He quickly found out that no one wanted to hear about increased taxes and he quickly dropped the subject. He was right about the effect of increased infrastructure funding but looking back on it, he was wrong to drop the subject since he lost anyway. Or maybe he shouldn’t have because then he might have been tempted to blame that one issue for his defeat.
In any event, politicians know that increasing taxes won’t do them any good politically. Which is why it’s amazing that it happens at all. But even when it does happen it’s usually a half-hearted measure that doesn’t get the job done which in turn enhances the arguments of anti-government tax haters.
When I was part of the Route Jurisdiction Committee in the 1980’s we discussed how complete our report ought to be. One or two of the state transportation guys thought that if the number we came up with to identify roadway needs was too big, the legislature wouldn’t believe us. More idealistic heads prevailed and we presented a report to the legislature that had two levels of service identified. For the lower level of service we identified about $13 billion in unmet needs for construction and maintenance of state highways, county roads and city streets. For a higher level of service the number was $26 billion.
The legislature looked at the number and said it can’t be done so they did something else. They funded about $2 billion in new road projects. That was 1989 and almost twenty years later people still act surprised that the roadway network hasn’t gotten better.
On the other hand, it hasn’t collapsed either. This tends to confirm the belief that we just keep asking for more money than we really need. In some ways they might be right. Forty years ago I was working for the State Highway Department in Seattle and had prepared a schedule for design of the Bay Freeway. The purpose of the Bay Freeway was to solve the “Mercer Mess”. That freeway never got built along with the RH Thomson Expressway and other projects that came up for consideration during the “freeway revolt”. The fact is, however, that the “Mercer Mess” is still there and people have been tolerating it for 40 years. It shouldn’t be surprising then that people think public works engineers overstate their needs.
Actually, it’s not the needs that get overstated; it’s the level of service. People say they hate congestion but when asked to pay for it directly they want to look at other alternatives. The level of service is reflected in design standards that have evolved over the years to provide roadways that are safer, better looking and with facilities for bicycles and pedestrians. This all costs money. These standards are what we compare current conditions against to calculate needs. Therefore, our calculation of needs turns out to be a big number.
So where does that leave us? We talk to ourselves about spending more money on public facilities because when we talk to the people who have the money (taxpayers) they tell us we’re asking for too much and accuse us of inefficient spending and bureaucratic bungling. So we talk to the elected representatives of those taxpayers and try to get them to increase taxes over the objections of the taxpayers who elected them. Sometimes they actually do raise taxes but not enough to do any good and sometimes they even fund the wrong things. All of this keeps us in the cycle of distrust that got us talking to ourselves in the first place.
So what are we to do? The first thing we need to do is recognize that we need to do something different. We’re not there yet. For many years, we did things the same way and it worked pretty well. We had the trust of our elected officials and they helped us get the funding we needed to keep things working pretty well. When that stopped working we didn’t change what we did because we were good at doing the wrong thing. We knew how to lobby elected officials and we knew how to make technical arguments to small groups of people on boards and commissions who doled out the money.
Today we’re still doing things the same old way because we haven’t noticed that it’s the wrong way to do the job now. We also haven’t been shown a better way. I’ve tried to do my part but it hasn’t worked. I wrote an article in this space some time ago about the need to create a positive vision of a better world in which public works are built and maintained properly. Nobody jumped on that bandwagon so I wrote a similar article in the APWA Reporter. Nobody jumped on that bandwagon either so I wrote a position paper for APWA that was sponsored by the APWA Leadership and Management Committee and sent on to the Board of Directors for consideration. Larry Frevert jumped on the bandwagon and adopted the position paper as his unifying theme for his year as president. The bandwagon still has lots of room in it because Larry’s statement at Congress and his article in the Reporter hasn’t enlisted any new volunteers.
We might be stuck in first gear because we haven’t explained well enough why a new approach is necessary and we haven’t trained anyone in the new approach. We’ve been doing the wrong thing well for so long that we aren’t really ready for the inevitable failure that will come when we try to do the new right thing. We won’t be very good at it in the beginning and we’ll need a lot of encouragement.
If we’re going to turn things around we have to get at least 20% of us to agree that we need to act differently and do things differently to make a difference. We then have to do a better job of identifying the new way of doing things than Larry and I have done so far. I’m hoping that someone reading this right now will take on that challenge and get in touch with me to find the articles I’ve talked about so that they can critique them and come up with a better plan.
Then we’ll need that same 20% or more to take the risk and start talking to people in the real world about what a better world looks like and why that better world will save money in the long run. Or maybe the risk takers will take a different risk and tell us we’re all wet and we really have been overstating needs for all these years.
I’m getting tired just thinking of all the work we have ahead of us so I think I’ll stop here. As usual, comments, suggestions, corrections or enlightenments can be shared with me at ostrowj@pacifier.com.