Republican Foot Dragging on Infrastructure has Historically Been a Problem

[FayeforCure]

Too bad Republicans have always a hard time conceptualizing the importance of investment in infrastructure as the common good that it is. Really pathetic!

Franklin Roosevelt's proposal for a national limited-access highway system, for example, which he first put forward in 1938, took 18 years to be realized. And that only happened when President Dwight Eisenhower embraced the idea. Even Ike had trouble convincing a reluctant Republican Congress to enact a gas tax to pay for his proposed National Defense Highway Act. (And this only happened when Ike cloaked the idea in the national defense concept.) And when they did finally pass this legislation, the Congress cut the amount of the President's proposed gas tax so that it was not adequate to build Ike's envisioned coast-to-coast interstate system.

Only when portions of the system began to be built did broad public support force Congress to enact the additional gas taxes needed to complete the President's bold vision. We all know how the story ends, with the Interstates being completed over 30 years and their subsequent transformation of the nation's landscape and economy over the next 60 years. Ironically, although the National Defense Interstate Highway System was never used in the nation's defense, it did underpin a five-fold increase in GDP after 1956 that enabled the US to sustain the defense budgets needed to win the Cold War.

America is poised for a transformation of similar magnitude, underpinned by a series of nationwide networks of high-speed rail lines focused within megaregions. It may take a generation or longer for President Obama's vision to be realized, but the process has begun. There will be setbacks along the way, like the one last week in Florida, but with the support of people of good will, who care about the nation's future, it will happen.

http://www.rpa.org/2011/02/spotlight-vol-10-no-4-why-high-speed-rail-is-right.html

And here is our local and more recent Republican foot dragging:

Stuck down in the far corner of the United States, Florida hardly is a central location for delivering goods across the East. This is particularly true for Miami. Nor is Florida positioned to become a regional shipping hub for Latin America, given the intense competition from other ports in the Caribbean.

This makes deepening all three Florida ports a highly speculative venture. Miami has taken the lead in getting its dredging project under way, but Jacksonville probably is better situated with a better rail network.

You might think that would concern a governor so worried about building things that could burden taxpayers.

There also is a consistency problem here.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in charge of dredging. But Florida's ports are not in the Corps budget. Putting them in the budget would require a congressional earmark.

Rick Scott is on the record as opposing congressional earmarks.

Dredging also is only a small part of the cost of readying the ports. They would need docks, cranes, rail lines, roads, storage facilities, etc. All this would cost a few billion. And the feds don't cover these infrastructure costs.

And there is this: Right now, as part of an expansion at the Port of Tampa, a connector road is being built to dump trucks directly onto Interstate 4 from the port. As cargo traffic increases at the port, I-4 is going to get a lot more congested.

"If you have high-speed rail, and move people onto rail system and get cars off road, that frees up space for trucks,'' says Richard Wainio, director of the Tampa Port Authority. "One tends to support the other.''

Has Scott considered the impact that expanding the Panama Canal will have on Florida roads?

Investing in ports is worthwhile.

Instead of paying dockworkers, rail workers, truck drivers and so on in California, Chicago and Atlanta to bring us our goods, we can pay Florida workers. The energy use and carbon footprint of shipping goods through the canal is much smaller than shipping them across the country by rail.

The problem is this requires investment and planning, not a convenient sound bite on CNN.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/os-mike-thomas-rick-scott-ports-0301120110301,0,2363716.column