Procrastination is a natural human response to things we know we ought to do, but don’t really want to deal with at the moment. People do it, governments do it.
The catastrophic breach in the levee protecting the city of New Orleans from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is only the latest — albeit the most spectacular — example of our collective willingness to postpone needed upgrades and repairs to our public infrastructure.
Sure, hindsight is 20/20 and right now we all think we have X-ray vision. As a country, we’re great at closing the barn door after all the cows have escaped. I’m pretty sure that the levee in New Orleans now will be shored up, as it should have been years ago, and that’s a good thing.
However, it doesn’t really address the larger issue of the widespread deterioration of our public infrastructure.
| While it may make sense from a financial standpoint to occasionally postpone routine maintenance and repairs for a year or so in order to be able to attend to other, more pressing matters, to do so repeatedly over an extended period is irresponsible. |
Just about every city in America has numerous examples of important infrastructure — a bridge or road or fire station — that is in desperate need of repairs that have been deferred into the (unspecified) future so that the money can be spent on something else deemed more important.
We see the results all around us, to the point where we don’t really even notice anymore.
Much of our highway system is crumbling, undersized or both. Before loading the family into the car for the summer vacation road trip, moms all across America probably stopped by Dick’s Sporting Goods to buy a mouthpiece for each of the kids in order to protect their dental work from the jarring road conditions of our interstate highways.
According to the Federal Highway Administration, more than 13 percent of our nation’s bridges, as of December 2004, were classified as being structurally deficient, while another 13 percent were classified as functionally obsolete. Nationwide, that adds up to nearly 160,000 bridges. The good news is that the number has declined by 2.5 percent during the past five years. The bad news is that it’s still an awful lot of bridges.
We see it all around us and, in moments when we can no longer ignore it, we rage and vent against whoever happens to be in office at the national, state and local level.
While this may be an emotionally therapeutic response, the real problem is that infrastructure is expensive to build and maintain, and as with most major expenses, the temptation is always present to take some, or all, of the money and spend it on something else. This is not a liberal or a conservative response, this is a human response. We all do it, even (or especially) in our private lives.
Likewise, government officials from both parties have a long tradition of postponing needed infrastructure repairs in order to save money.
While it may make sense from a financial standpoint to occasionally postpone routine maintenance and repairs for a year or so in order to be able to attend to other, more pressing matters, to do so repeatedly over an extended period is irresponsible. Not only does it create a hazard to the public, it also dramatically increases the cost of those repairs once we actually do get around to performing them.
I’m sure that there will be dozens of legacies resulting from Hurricane Katrina. I just hope that one of them will be that we begin to tackle our infrastructure needs head on, rather than continuing to pretend that we’ll fix the problem “tomorrow.”
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