cyras21 wrote:I never said to ship buses to NO via C5s, simply that if someone else needed them the US would do so. I understand the logistics of things but there is MORE the govt can be doing right now. They just got caught with their pants down. One things that isn't being reported on is that Bush cut the levee funding by 80% in 2003 while New Orleans was REPAIRING and UPGRADING the system.
When I started out in public service (in transportation), cities bought their own stuff. If they needed a traffic signal system (my specialty), they sold bonds to borrow the money from their people, and bought one. They kept it for as long as it took to pay off the bonds, and then they bought a new one.
At that time, transportation received federal funding (which by law can only go to states, not to cities) in one of several ways: Interstate, Primary, Secondary, or Urban Systems highway programs. Some community-development block grants got used for small transportation projects. Those three larger systems were primarily used for routes with regional significance. Local streets were funded by selling bonds. Drainage projects were funded solely by local bond sales, with only the occasional help from the Corps of Engineers, who have been primarily concerned with flood control lakes.
In the early 90's, federal programs changed, providing a new program for cities with what the EPA described as bad air, called the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Program. CMAQ became the funding source of choice for operational improvements like traffic signal systems. Cities then immediately started selling bonds for other things and let the feds pay for most of their infrastructure improvements. But the cities still had to maintain what they bought with federal money.
Now, even that has changed. Most large cities complain that they can't fund their maintenance without large doses of federal money, and there is now an Operations and Maintenance program in federal transportation funding. The money is spent poorly, because nobody is held accountable in practical ways. The result is the recently announce National Traffic Signal Report Card (the first publicly announced accountability mechanism in years), which gave the country a D. Back when these were funded locally, if there was a problem, the local guy in charge got to explain it to the public, often on TV news. I know; I was that local guy for many years.
I submit that after New Orleans flooded in the early part of the 20th century, the city leaders sold bonds to build the levee system. They sold bonds to upgrade them, and they taxed the people protected by them to maintain them and pay off the bonds. I suspect that was true at least until the last two decades. The Corps of Engineers may have been involved, but if they were, the majority of the funds still came from local sources, I expect.
The dependance of local governments on federal money to maintain, let alone build their infrastructure has exploded in recent years. I think many would like to see the federal government back out of those activities, for three reasons: 1.) the accountability to spend the money wisely is higher when it's local money being spent, 2.) federal agencies are filled with bureaucrats who do not know and do not understand the local situation, and 3.) there is more money available because it doesn't stop off in some distant capital for a heavy night out on the town.
The problem is that the local governments have happily given over those responsibilities to higher levels of government so that they can pursue other things, such as local welfare programs, rent support, fancy new buildings, using their tax capacity to fund boondoggles like sports stadiums, pandering to uniformed services (the one thing they can't delegate up the line, though they immediately do even that when there is a disaster), and so on. When I was at the City of San Antonio, I ran the traffic signals out of a former flood-gate control building about the size of a mobile home. It worked. That piece of land is now a park where you can get knifed real easily if you are there at the wrong time, and the control center is shared in a state-built Taj Mahal in the suburbs. Blaming the feds for screwups is the standard local-government schtick, but I think the most disappointing of all officials associated with this disaster is the mayor of New Orleans.
If the levees needed maintenance five years ago, and everyone knew it, then why didn't the City of New Orleans sell some bonds and fix them, like they would have 50 years ago? They could have put off some park projects, or some cultural projects, and so on, if they really thought it was important. Fact is, they didn't think it was that important, except as a tool for political posturing. They (meaning the people and their elected representatives) didn't really believe the doomsday scenarios.
There are many cities as vulnerable to such disasters as New Orleans, though perhaps the disasters that would create the problem are different, because they no longer care about their local infrastructure and have let it decay.
Rick "who sees no advantage to the federalization of local infrastructure maintenance, but who doesn't blame the individuals saddled with the distant responsibility" Denney
