Robert Smith: Frick Park’s glamour shot
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We have all seen the celebrity glamour shots at awards shows. The well-designed backdrop, adoring peer group crowd, high-end clothing and jewelry, and sudden strike-the-pose camera snapshots.
We also regularly see the politician glamour shot. The biggie-sized check, adoring crowd typically full of political cronies, poser snapshots or filmed snippets in the local news, back slaps and handshakes as the people’s money is accumulated into one place and handed over through no effort of the awarder other than the force of government tax collections.
What is not seen is the individual taxpayer’s driveway that was not built, savings or payments for college tuition, new tires for the car, a bit of investment for old age, braces for the kid’s teeth, ad infinitum, that is represented by this money transferred from individual taxpayers to the government till to be used as the prop for the politician’s glamour shot.
Juxtapose the politician glamour shot image with the recent bridge collapse near Pittsburgh’s Frick Park. The mass transit bus carrying the rube financiers of the state’s crumbling infrastructure to their work-a-day lives dangling on the rubble of their community’s bridge, or the overturned car when the bridge suddenly collapsed and was pulled from underneath it and into the ravine.
Unfortunately, there is no glamour shot to be had with basic highway and bridge maintenance. PennDOT has been running at a severe deficit for some time and this deficit will only become worse. The professional engineers and planners at PennDOT have studied and well understand the problems of the decaying roadways and bridges. However, when government power and bureaucratic inefficiency and waste are involved, supplemented by the need for politicians’ reelections, the practicality of fixing the commoners’ travel paths becomes less important.
Based on a 2019 audit of PennDOT, $4.25 billion was found to have been diverted to the Pennsylvania State Police from the Pennsylvania Motor License Fund that is supposed to be used to fund roadways and bridges. Just in the 2017-18 time frame, $800 million was transferred from the Motor License Fund to the state police. This is not to say that the state police are any less necessary, but there should be some other means to address the separate policing budget.
In addition, funds from the PennDOT-administered Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund showed $65.2 million awarded over a three-year period through Gov. Tom Wolf’s discretion without a clear demonstration of need.
These and a multitude of other man-caused governmental problems ends with a bridge collapsed into a ravine, thankfully with nobody killed.
All of this and more exists within the backdrop of Pennsylvania having one of the highest gasoline taxes in the nation that is supposed to address the highway and bridge issues. Pennsylvania currently has the third highest gas tax rate in the country. As a threshold requirement of government, safety of the citizens should be a priority, including basic infrastructure. Imagine buying new furniture or remodeling your kitchen when the foundation of your house is in serious need of repair.
Any state politician who would have you believe there is no waste, fraud or abuse in the commonwealth’s budget that could go a long way to solving our infrastructure concerns is beyond belief. As a consequence of government malfeasance, PennDOT has undertaken a study for additional sources of revenue through a Planning and Environmental Linkages (PEL) study. Get your checkbook out and ready.
In addition to finding other sources of the taxpayer’s money, as an (un)expected issue in the PennDOT study is the antiquated National Environmental Policy Act. Through the NEPA requirements, the classics of bureaucratic flawed thinking, arbitrary and capricious standards, politicized application, and lengthy eco-activist litigation turn a simple roadway or bridge project into a multi-year and in some cases decades-long project, with the add-on detrimental increase to the overall cost of the project. Every delay and procedural hurdle in the process increases costs and postpones safer roadways and bridges, arguably for little or no environmental benefit.
Just as surely as our infrastructure is decaying and crumbling due to a bloated and inefficient government at all levels run by fallen and deficient people, the scene at the Frick Park bridge collapse will be used as the emotional tool to ensure the next glamour shot distribution of we the people’s time-earned money.
Robert Smith is an environmental scientist and co-owner of a Pittsburgh-area environmental consulting company.