Many moons ago, there was a small-town mayor named Harry Reed who managed to wring a lot of wisdom out of his eighth-grade education. “Nobody wants to build sewers,” said Harry. “On Election Day, it’s easier to point to a library or park or post office than a hole in the ground.”
Harry Reed was my great uncle. And he was great.
While there might not be a lot of votes to be had building sewers, we need sewers every bit as much as we need parks and libraries, schools and social programs. Has anybody wanted to buy new tires for their car? It’s something you simply have to do. So are sewers.
In Washington, the Senate is opening debate on a ginormous infrastructure deal pushed through the House by President Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. So far, it appears Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will not stand in the way as it works its way through the Senate, which is saying a lot.
The president’s trillion-dollar infrastructure bill will undoubtedly contain more pork than every Jimmy Dean sausage ever made, including crazy pet projects that will light up the phones on talk radio when the ugly details finally come to light
A trillion is a million millions, a thousand billions, a one followed by twelve zeros, which is even more zeros than are currently serving in Congress. The bill includes $110 billion for roads and bridges, $66 billion for passenger and freight rail, $65 billion for broadband, $55 billion for water projects and another $39.2 billion for public transportation.
Deficits, schmeficits!
It’s a guarantee huge amounts of money are going to end up getting flushed down the sewers Harry Reed built all those years ago. And I’m OK with that. In the depths of the Great Depression, FDR threw billions at the problem, hoping some of it would stick.
Some of it did.
Today, there are parks, libraries, dams, roads and airports still in use nearly 90 years after FDR’s spending spree, including local landmarks such as the Hollywood Bowl fountains, the Burbank Post Office, Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, the Mosaic Wall in Inglewood, Arcadia Park and the Naval and Marine Training Center on Stadium Way, among others.
Investing in concrete and rebar and fiber optic cables is an investment in America’s future.
Recently, the MTA board signed contracts with Bechtel, Meridiam Infrastructure and American Triple I Partners, along with L.A. SkyRail Express, to develop plans for a light rail (or in SkyRail’s case, a monorail) link through the perpetual gridlock in the Sepulveda Pass, aka the 7th Circle of Traffic Hell. These projects are big-ticket items: the combined design/development tab alone is $133 million. The actual construction costs will be north of $10 billion.
“That’s a lot of money, McIntyre!” It is. And it’s unlikely I’ll live to enjoy a gridlock-free 405.
By the time the environmental impact reports are done, the NIMBY lawsuits are settled and the usual labor/community activist/political shenanigans play out, The Wife will have already taken my car keys away.
Still, Los Angeles desperately needs a comprehensive rail system that gives commuters a practical alternative to stuffing more cars onto roadways that will never be wide enough to accommodate an ever-growing population.In the future, taking a train to the airport will be a given, with our kids and grandkids rolling their eyes when we tell them for the thousandth time how it used to be when we burned up thousands of hours of our lives pounding on the steering wheels of our cars while sitting in traffic.
Finally, there is a way forward, but it will require spending a lot of dough to dig a very big hole through the Sepulveda Pass.
Harry Reed would approve.
Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sundays. He can be reached at: Doug@DougMcIntyre.com.
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August 08, 2021 at 07:00PM
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Let’s spend now to avoid traffic later - OCRegister
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