Infrastructure Funding. March 8, 2018

Copyright © 2018                                                         John F. Oyler

March 8, 2018

Infrastructure Funding

The students in the Senior Design Projects program at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Pittsburgh have just completed a workshop on infrastructure funding, a subject that is particularly relevant for all civil engineers.

The decaying condition of the infrastructure is especially obvious in our area this winter, a season that has brought a new meaning to the term “pothole”. My personal candidate for the worst pothole in Pittsburgh is the one in the middle of Forbes Avenue as you approach Craft Avenue from the west. It has been filled, at least temporarily, this week, but at its peak created monumental chaos. Evidence of its destructive potential was the continuously growing collection of hubcaps stacked against the curbs.

It is not surprising that the students concluded that a significant increase in investment in our infrastructure would be desirable. In addition to improving everyone’s quality of life, such an investment would provide a positive boost to the economy and generate meaningful new jobs in engineering and construction. A secondary effect would be the reduction in costs for all businesses, especially those related to transportation.

In support of this workshop I decided to contact the two major candidates in the local special election for U. S. Congress this month. I checked the websites for candidates and confirmed my suspicion that they both supported the concept of “fixing the infrastructure” in principle, but lacked any specifics in level of investment or source of revenue to pay for it.

I am aware that the FAST (Fixing America’s Surface Transportation) legislation passed in 2015 establishes a level of about sixty billion dollars a year for surface transportation, including public transit. I believe that   about forty-five billion dollars a year of this total is allocated for highways and bridges.

I also am aware that the Highway Trust Fund, the designated source of income for highways and bridges, is no longer able to provide that level of funding. It depends upon the federal gas tax established in 1993 at 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline, with no provision for indexing to account for inflation, which has amounted to forty five percent in the intervening thirty-five years.

Consequently, I emailed both campaign headquarters, reported that the current federal level of funding the highways and bridges part of infrastructure was about forty-five billion dollars a year, and asked each of them what level of funding they supported and how they would plan to generate revenue to support it.

I suppose the results were predictable. Two weeks later I have had no response from the campaign headquarters of one of the candidates. A staffer from the other candidate’s headquarters did contact me by telephone and suggest that I refer to their website for their position on infrastructure funding and became annoyed when I suggested he re-read my email, which clearly stated I had already perused their website.

In the interim, of course, the current administration and the loyal opposition have announced their proposals, one of which is far too frugal and the other absurdly high with no explanation of the source for funding it. This, of course, is the classic example of our current political climate. Neither side is interested in finding a viable compromise solution that would benefit all of us.

Whichever of these non-responsive candidates is elected, his incumbency will only last until the election next Fall. By then the gerrymander controversy may well have re-districted him into a head-to-head conflict with a current Congressman.

It will be interesting to see how this controversy is resolved. The current map is criticized for two reasons. The strange shape of some of the Congressional districts is easy to question; indeed compactness is a property that appears easy to achieve. The fact that the number of Congressmen in Pennsylvania from each party is not proportional to the number of voters in each party in the whole state is more difficult to remedy.

The two major cities in Pennsylvania are bastions of one party rule; the majority of their voters in the state are concentrated there. The only way to dilute their majority and elect more Congressmen is to disregard the compactness principle.

The situation is complicated by the possibility that the State Supreme Court, which unfortunately is a political organization rather than an objective body dedicated to justice, may end up drawing the new map. I am impressed with the one majority party Justice who elected not to support their politicizing a judicial issue.

It is ironic that a body claiming it was aiming for “compactness” chose to carve Mt. Lebanon out of the district containing its neighbors, which just happened to protect the current Congressional candidate from their party from running against a sitting Congressman from the same party.

I still hope that a group of Moderates in both parties will get together and work out a viable compromise on infrastructure funding, and that that might be a beginning of bringing our society together again. I doubt that such a group will include the successful candidate in our current election, regardless of which one is elected.