Understanding Government

If the Obama administration pushes forward with all the lines that states have agreed to fund, and if other governors — Democrat or Republican — stay the course and insist on modern rail infrastructure in their regions, states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and now Florida will live to regret their decisions rejecting these projects, and their residents will, sooner or later, demand that they get the same services that exist around the country.  (In Wisconsin, voters would have had to commit all of two cents per year per person to get their line built).  All this will happen if there are enough states and enough politicians in Washington willing to stand up for smart growth on a national scale (as well as on the local one).  And funds that were slated for states saying no to high-speed rail must be used for those states willing to move forward.

The Wall Street Journal’s Conor Daugherty reports that state and local revenues were down seven percent in the third quarter of 2009 from a year ago — and the third quarter of 2008 was not exactly the salad days of local revenue collection. The culprit is less money from income taxes and sales taxes. The result is that states must increase tax rates and spend less at a time when the federal government is cutting taxes and spending more. The Obama administration and Congress leavened this huge federal-local disconnect by handing states fiscal stabilization money from the stimulus bill. However, the administration has not responded to the crisis in local governance with the comprehensive aid package that they provided to, say, financial firms in peril. (more…)

The New York Times’ Michael Cooper and Griff Palmer excoriate state governments across the country for spending federal stimulus money on rural, instead of urban, highway and road projects. Cooper and Palmer point out that 2/3 of the U.S. population lives in metropolitan regions and 3/4 of economic activity occurs in these regions yet less than half of the $16.4 billion in stimulus transportation cash allocated so far has gone toward metropolitan areas.

The Obama administration’s response is that they’re learning lessons about how to best direct transportation money, particularly as the five-year surface transportation spending bill is up for re-authorization. The lesson, though, seems pretty clear: if it is indeed of paramount importance that congested and/or crumbling cities get transportation cash, earmark that money directly to the cities. Maybe that usurps state rights, but, if so, that’s a conversation to have when Congress passes the transportation spending bill. It’s not that something to learn after the Transportation Dept. has already sent out the money.-MB

Every five years, Congress passes a massive surface transportation bill (the one set to expire cost $244 billion) that funds infrastructure projects for highways, roads and mass transit across the country. This was supposed to be the year for a new bill but Michael Cooper of the New York Times’ says it won’t happen: the current plan will just be extended for 18 months. Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood told Cooper the long delay was the "most realistic approach."

For a small but dedicated group of people who write about urban politics, surface transportation re-authorization is a BIG DEAL. Here — with growing resistance toward automobiles that cause greenhouse gas emissions — was a chance to break the decades-long ratio of 80 percent of the bill’s spending going to highway and road projects and just 20 percent to mass transit. In that spirit, it made sense to discuss the bill along side the cap-and-trade legislation glacially winding its way through Congress. It also seemed for a while there that the Obama administration was making public transit a pet issue.

Instead, taking on glaring urban infrastructure problems and the auto-industry complex will wait another day, or, I guess, year-and-a-half. Hopefully Obama and LaHood will still be inclined then to push Congress to change the legislation’s spending structure.-MB