I happened to recently see a replay of a documentary entitled “Liquid Assets-The Story of Our Water Infrastructure.” The film is part of a project at Penn State.
There’s a lot of talk right now about funding infrastructure as both a sensible investment in our future and as a means of stimulating the economy, although as Robert Reich pointed out on-air today on CNN, critics will point out large projects can take a while to get going.
But as the documentary mentions, there are projects all over the country involving water and sewer that need funding, and while they may not be as um, sexy, as light rail or big bridges, they are no less vital. And the film doesn’t just focus on big city projects like Atlanta and New York, it also features a small town in Pennsylvania that simply has no sanitary sewer. The lines just empty into the creek, or even worse, back up into lawns and streets. In 2008. Despite a decade or more of efforts to fund a sewer system, little progress has been made. And nobody should care whether these are “real” Americans or “fake” Americans, they’re Americans for crying out loud.
These are the kinds of nuts and bolts issues that Republicans have ignored with their endless and robotic attacks on government and taxes. Sure, nobody wants to pay more taxes, but poop backing up into lawns and streets isn’t exactly a neat thing either.
So as we move into the next administration, it would be wise for the Congress to fund basic water and sewer projects, not only to help the environment but to help our country compete on a global stage. It’s kind of hard to attract business without clean water and sewer systems.
Wow.
Republicans have that much power in cities/communities dominated by democrats?
For example, here in la la land, how did republicans stop the democrats from fixing the infrastructure?
Or in seattle.
Localized infrastructure like sidewalks, sewers, etc., historically have been paid for by taxing the property owners who benefit from them. I know of a small unincorporated community in western Washington that replaced a collection of old and leaky septic tanks with a sewer system at a cost of about $48,000 per home. By throwing some government grant money into the pot and spreading the cost over 40 years, its cost was brought down to about $40 per month for the homeowners. Most went along with it, but some griped mightily about having this extra expense added to their monthly bills. And that’s just for one utility out of many that each household needs — add sidewalks, street improvements, water lines, phone, heat, school taxes, etc., and you’re talking big money just to live under a roof you own.
* * * * *
But all of this is peanuts compared to the real water issue. Remember Atlanta’s water crisis last summer? That’s puny compared to what’s happening in the American heartland. The Ogallala Aquifer is being depleted. I’ll repeat that sentence:
The Ogallala Aquifer is being depleted.
And when the Ogallala’s water is gone, perhaps 25 years from now, the U.S. will become a net food importer.
Fyi, unlike a petroleum deposit, an aquifer is theoretically a renewable resource. Depletion occurs when water withdrawals exceed the recharge rate. Recharge comes from rainfall, streamflows, and surface runoff seeping into the ground and collecting in the underground formation that constitutes the aquifer. Aquifers recharge very slowly, and irrigation pumping withdraws water very quickly. Unless water withdrawals are strictly regulated so they don’t exceed the recharge rate, an aquifer eventually will dry up. It can then take thousands of years of natural recharge to refill it. In many, if not most, areas of the U.S. withdrawals exceed recharge with the result our aquifers are being depleted. In most places, the water crisis is still years away, but we are creating a hell of a problem for future generations.
@1 “how did republicans stop the democrats from fixing the infrastructure?”
Very simple, Marvin Stupe. For over a decade, Republicans used their 1-vote majority in the state senate to block transportation spending. In most Washington counties, GOP county commissioners can and do use their control of county governments to block infrastructure spending of all kinds. Republicans don’t believe in infrastructure investment; they’d rather cut taxes for property owners. Washington’s Democratic voters are crammed into relatively small urban areas; most of Washington’s land area is controlled by Republican-dominated jurisdictions. And, needless to say, most of our nation’s water problems are in states under the political control of Republicans who refuse to regulate water usage — they won’t even tell people to water their lawns less, aquifers be damned. Comprende? Nah, you don’t understand anything at all.
You see, Marvin, the key to posting intelligent comments is getting facts before shooting off your mouth. It’s your indifference to facts that makes you look like the ignorant rube you, in fact, are.
A time of economic collapse when stimulus spending is needed is the perfect time to put people to work and money in circulation by building necessary public works projects. If you object to deficit spending, why then, just tax the people who got rich by looting the economy over the last 8 years. Republicans call this “socialism” but it’s actually “restitution.”
@4:
See Chehalis, flooding of area – December 2007.
The Feds were ready to provide money to address this when it was just potential, but the county leadership simply couldn’t go to the voters and ask for a tax increase to cover their share of the necessary work. So the Feds found another use for the money.
And one day potential became actual.
The majority of that county council were Republicans, to the best of my knowledge.
To republicans, everything but their wallets is an externality, not worthy of consideration.
Deferred Maintenance:
Personal Experience:
I’ve dealt with deferred maintenance problems before. I see it in my own car – small problems which I put off fixing until, when combined with many other problems, make it uneconomical to repair the car at all, and it just gets sent to scrap. I’ve also seen it in my house – we’ve put off new siding for several years, and now we have to deal with the prospect of re-siding the house and getting a new roof at the same time, along with replacement of most of our major appliances which have hit their 15-year lifespan and are showing signs of “limping along”.
State Transportation:
Locally, you see it in deferred projects which are continually “on hold” for lack of funding, or combined with an approval process for the design which is dependent upon funding.
So that’s how you now have the 520 bridge, the Viaduct, and other transportation replacement projects all hit “critical mass” at the same time as light rail, increased bus service, etc. are needed. Also, transportation people warn of the big shock just around the corner – the roadbed of I-5 from Vancouver Wash. to Blaine all needs to be replaced, as it was only designed to carry 1/4 of today’s traffic volume for a maximum of 50 years. This isn’t just re-surfacing, it’s tearing up the roadway and re-building the road bed at the base!
Nationally:
I remember reading a magazine article, around 1970 or so, which warned that we were becoming too dependent upon oil, that U.S. sources were insufficient to keep up with the rapidly increasing demand for oil, and that reliance upon mid-east oil had serious risks due to the volatile nature of the region. But such calls were ingnored then because we seem to wait for a crisis before we do anything. Now, almost forty years later, the problem hasn’t solved itself, but we seem to keep waiting for it to do so on it’s own.
Likewise, Roger Rabbit’s reference to the water issue in the midwest shows that we need to make major reforms now – but we are unlikely to do so. If Obama and the Democratic Congress try to impose needed legislation (it’s a multi-state issue), then the Republicans will use it as a rallying cry – “Democrats want to keep you from having a lawn! Democrats want to raise the cost of food by keeping you from irrigating your crops from water drawn from pumps on your own land!!!!!”
Other issues which will change the balance of U.S. wealth in the long run. These include the trade deficit, the decline of our manufacturing base, the loss of topsoil in the Great Plains at an alarming rate, U.S. educational standards not keeping up with the rest of the industrialized world, etc.
SUMMARY:
We’ve got a LOT of work ahead of us. In the meantime, could we PLEASE just go ahead and implement the existing plan to replace the 520 bridge, before it breaks up on it’s own?
In fact, in recent years (well, actually recent decades) the Republicans have pushed relentlessly in many locations for privatization of not only electric utilities, but water and sewer systems.
Management of these operations requires very long-term planning, which is, to say the least, at odds with a corporate ethos that’s driven by constant obsession with short-term profitability.
By the way, I’m not anti-immigration (or anti-Latino) by any stretch of the imagination.
But I AM aware that a lot of the citizens of New Orleans, who expected a big boost from federal dollars in the reconstruction efforts, were shocked to see the big contract(s) go on a no-bid basis to the big Republican firms, who then sub-contracted it within days to (mostly Texas) firms who were in town weeks later with a lot of workers who residents suspected weren’t legally entitled to work in the U.S. New Orlean’s businesses, for the most part only got the “scrap work” – lots of labor for little profit.
So the firms that got the big contracts seemed to make huge profits by contracting with firms which paid minimal wages, much of which might have been sent “home” to families elsewhere.
So in our rush to catch up with infrastructure work, we need to make sure (a) it’s done on a fair basis, and (b) that the money stays locally to improve our economy, rather than getting shifted offshore (either by corporate shenanigans, or through employment of workers who don’t have the right to work here).
One of the fastest ways to ensure this is through the bidding process. Require each bidder to comply with audits of it’s workforce, that contractors have to pay the usual “prevailing wage” (which removes any advantage to hiring non-union labor).
The Big Business part of the Republican coalition wants immigration, because cheap immigrant workers keep labor costs down.
And Big Government wants the taxes paid by immigrant workers to keep Social Security solvent.
Republican Party leaders know this, of course, so they nod and say “yes, yes, yes” to their supporters who want an immigration crackdown — and then turn their backs on them.
The anti-infrastructure Republican mentality is the same found in our banana republic neighbors. They want to pick the fruit but do not want to plant the trees.
Yep, Roger, the immigration issue kind of caught some national Republican leaders by surprise in 2006. Some local candidates got lots of complaints about all those “strange looking brown people who talk funny”, and tried to turn it into an issue in their campaigns.
Sure, there were lots of immigrants working in agriculture in the southwestern U.S. for years, and it wasn’t an issue. But when they figured out there was a lot more money made in other industries – like construction, landscaping, etc., they became a lot more visible to folks in the rest of the U.S., and some people didn’t like so many “brown” people around. Of course, they couldn’t just say “we should run all the brown people out of town”, so they tried to jump to the assumption that the great majority of them were in the U.S. illegally, so it became not only an “immigration” issue, but also a “homeland security” issue – at least in their justification.
But what these local Republicans didn’t appreciate, but most of those in Congress did, was that the people who supplied the real power and money behind the Republican Party were perfectly happy having lots of immigration into the U.S. to keep wages low, and if they were illegal immigrants, so much the better. So that’s when in 2006 we saw the rather funny dance as Republicans tried to mobilize their base around the immigration issue, but at the same time making sure that nothing was really done to stop the flow of immigrants across the border. You saw silly steps like creating a “wall” at the border built with massive infusions of federal tax dollars, even though it’s easily breachable by going over or around it (there was never a ten foot wall that couldn’t be defeated by an eleven-foot ladder).
Of course, there really is a simple way to cut down on illegal immigrants. Make the corporate CEO criminally responsible for any illegal immigrants working for his firm, or for any firms with which his firm contracts.
If you think the federal government would never enforce such a rule, ask Costco about the trouble it got into when it imported rugs from Egypt which turned out to be from Taliban-controlled Afganistan. If you make it an enforcement priority, then the CEOs will go to great lengths to make sure it happens.