Money for the Cities
State governments aren’t very good at looking out for their golden geese:
According to an analysis by The New York Times of 5,274 transportation projects approved so far — the most complete look yet at how states plan to spend their stimulus money — the 100 largest metropolitan areas are getting less than half the money from the biggest pot of transportation stimulus money. In many cases, they have lost a tug of war with state lawmakers that urban advocates say could hurt the nation’s economic engines.
The immediate problem is that this is going to reduce the effectiveness of the stimulus. But this is basically always a major problem with infrastructure investment; state lawmakers want to send money to their constituents and try to spread economic activity around, even though that’s generally actively counterproductive. And in the meantime, they undermine their cities, which are the major sources of employment and tax revenue.
It’s absolutely crucial that the new transportation bill do more to focus spending at the metropolitan level. And indeed, this is one of the goals of the Oberstar transportation bill. As that is unlikely to get anywhere in this legislative session, it would be nice if in filling the highway trust fund’s budget gap the Congress tacked on a reform giving states an incentive to use federal money where the people are — for the sake of short and long term economic performance.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
I’d think the focus should be on cities as there is a historic public underinvestment in USA cities vis-a-vis EU and Canada. Apparently you can’t even cross the street in some LA neighbourhoods without a freeway car. The only USA transit I’ve was Las Vegas, ranked best in North America a few times.
Without transit your casual labourers can’t get to homes to do renos or to warehouses to unload trucks, or to offices to move equipment and do renos, or to construction sites; have to pay more expensive workers and the health of at-risk populations degrades. If are sprawling should at least encourage suburban farming and carpooling. When I drove gridlock was stressful; good riddance.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
The proponents of doing away with ’socialist’ top-down gummint conveniently ignore issues such as this. It is true - and I’m one of them that believes this way - that localities should govern themselves, but this gets mixed up in investments in public goods. In my view it is too easy to get gamed at the local level and to do a bad job at spending money. Esp. OPM.
Dan