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Tue, 18 Dec 2007
[Appeared last week in the Woonsocket Call, the Pawtucket Times and other fine RIMG papers.]
An interesting fall: One week we open a stylish new bridge, and the next week, one of the most important bridges in the state is found to be unsafe for anything as heavy as, say, a truck. The Department of Transportation says they can't afford to fix the I-95 bridge in Pawtucket any time soon. But it would be cheap to build in a slightly greater upslope on either side of the bridge. That way, you can gun your engine as you approach the bridge, and soar across the weakened span without having to worry about whether there is more rust or steel beneath your wheels. Detours are for sissies.
But wait a minute. It can't just be cost, because at the same time DOT says they can't do anything about the Pawtucket Bridge, they just finished a new bridge in Providence and they're about to begin construction on a replacement for the Sakonnet River Bridge. They have money for new construction, but not for repairs?
As usual, we're at the end of a tale that only makes sense when you begin at the beginning. So here it is: sometime back in the 1970's -- it's a little hard to be precise from the documents I've seen -- the Assembly and the Governor decided to borrow several million dollars, not for any specific project, but just to keep the rivers of federal highway money flowing down the corridors of the state house. The interstate highways were almost done, and who'd want to dam that torrent? That money required a state match, and, well, why not borrow to match it?
Of course borrowed money isn't free, and you do have to pay it back, with interest. They borrowed it anyway, and simply took the interest payments out of the maintenance budget, and no one was the wiser. This created a budget hole, but who would miss a year's worth of bridge-painting? Besides, it's more fun to ask for a bond issue to build a bunch of new stuff than it is to admit to the House Finance chair that you're over budget.
But the next year the budget hole was still there, and the additional debt service only made it deeper. Unfortunately, no one had the guts to say this was a problem, that year, or the next, or any year since. As long as DOT could keep borrowing and new roads keep getting built, then everyone was happy, even if the maintenance situation got worse each year. And now the detour signs in Pawtucket tell you how bad it is.
In fact, the debt problem is so bad that a few years ago, those debt payments were moved out of DOT's budget and into the Department of Administration. This was a meaningless accounting change, but again it avoided the shame of having to admit they were spending way beyond their means. This coming year, DOT will borrow about $40 million, just about the same amount they pay in debt service. Does it sound like using one credit card to pay the minimum balance on another? It is. Other states don't borrow like we do; they reserve borrowing for special big projects, not the routine stuff we use it for here.
This is a crazy way to run the state's finances, and I haven't even gotten to the hundreds of millions in off-books, no-referendum borrowing of the past three years and the resulting $49 million in additional debt payments this year. The cost of DOT borrowing is a major contributor to the disaster of our state budget, but the blame is shared so widely that no one wants to talk about it because who could they accuse?
Another legacy of these bad decisions is that we don't fix roads and bridges; we replace them, since you can get federal money for new construction, but not maintenance. The old Jamestown Bridge didn't have the capacity of the new bridge, but its replacement was dictated by department finances, as much as by anything else. They didn't have money to do anything else. The current DOT Chief Engineer has already spoken about "replacing" the Pawtucket bridge. The grand new I-boondoggle over the Providence River, which will cost us upwards of $610 million before it's done, was originally proposed as a $150 million alternative to $50 million in bridge repairs. (In what I'm sure is nothing more than an alarming coincidence, the Sakonnet River Bridge replacement project is now said to be a $144 million alternative to $70 million in repairs.)
As the experience of tens of thousands of drivers can already attest, the I-boondoggle will do just about nothing to improve traffic, but by the time we count all the debt service, we'll have spent around a billion dollars on it. That's about one entire year's worth of state income taxes, in case you're wondering. DOT doesn't want you to think of that when you're next stuck in traffic there, and that's why they've paid almost $200,000 to the Providence PR firm, Duffy and Shanley, whose job it is to make you think about the bridge's stylish design instead. And it is stylish, isn't it?
The Governor doesn't want you to think about wrong-headed billion-dollar spending decisions, either. He wants you to ignore those little details and blame the state budget crisis on welfare recipients and interpreters on the state payroll. Will we let him?
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