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Lot of talk about the Federal government need to step into a city and manage the bridges. Cities have (often highly) paid inspectors to do just that, inspect b
by WaitWaitWha 5y ago
Lot of talk about the Federal government need to step into a city and manage the bridges.
Cities have (often highly) paid inspectors to do just that, inspect bridges and make recommendations, and issue warnings. As noted by PascLeRasc et al. the degradation of the bridge has been reported to the city.
As for funding through Federal government, my experience has always been:
The resident pays their Federal tax. The Fed takes their administrative cut.
Fed allocates remaining funds to the State. The State takes their administrative cut.
State allocates remaining funds to the City (or county). The city takes their administrative cut.
City allocates remaining funds to contractors to fix the bridges.
Put it in an other way, humans value things exponentially more when their own sweat went into the things, than if it was just given to them. By coming at State level, residents have a closer connection and understanding where the money came from, and would demand higher accountability.
Just my opinion.
- SQueeeeeL 5y agoYou should look into Strong Towns, they basically make the same argument. The Federal govt providing so many grants for infrastructure projects have basically made cities spread out, overgrown and fiscally insolvent.
- MattGaiser 5y agoOr they just oppose doing anything at all. Plenty of condos are in a similarly extremely dilapidated condition because the owners never want to pay for anything. People won’t fund the infrastructure that supports their bedroom when it comes out of their own pocket.
- ineedasername 5y agoFederal taxes redistribute tax money to areas where the burden exceeds the local ability to cover the cost. While PA as a whole received a bit more than it sends to the Feds, cities like Pittsburgh almost always send significantly more on both the state & federal level than they receive in return. (I could not find specific data for Pittsburgh, so it's possible this trend does not apply there.) Centers of commerce &/or industry like Pittsburgh also tend to generate more economic benefits than can easily be measure by tax dollars alone. Administrative costs for programs also don't usually to exceed more then 1-2% after accounting for Fed & State administrative costs [0] While not great, If the cost of repairing infrastructure in a given region is $500,000,000,000, then $100M in administrative costs is not going to significantly alter the what that pool of money can accomplish, and no matter the tax system can never be diminished to 0%. "Skin in the game" is also not an apt metaphor here. It implies that a sufficient number of local residents will care enough about something like this, but in reality a bridge or other piece of infrastructure 20-30 miles away that a person rarely uses is still too abstract of a thing to really feel "Hey, I'd be willing to pay more of my own money to cover its cost". If you lower their fed taxes and raise their local taxes to cover costs I still don't think they'll feel any more sense of ownership over the issue than before. For most people, most things that are just a little bit outside of their usual experience are simply too intangible to feel much skin in the game. The situation we're already in with respect to infrastructure is a case in point. [0] https://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-federal-low-income-spending-goes-for-overhead-and-bureaucrats-is https://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-feder...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]