Exhibit A in the argument for infrastructure spending: Surfside
The bridges won’t collapse. The runways are fine. The water’s clean. Broadband? Who doesn’t have broadband? So there’s some potholes on the freeway — this is a reason to spend trillions of dollars on “infrastructure?”
Welcome to Surfside, Florida, 2021. Welcome to Flint, Michigan, 2014. Welcome to the United States of America, in which every safety measure is supposed to be in place and every code is supposed to be adhered to. To boot, none of it is supposed to cost anything. It just is.
Except, it just isn’t, not anymore, anyway. There is only so long that neglect can be neglected without dire consequences. How many other high-rises like Champlain in Surfside are there? How many fundamental safety repairs are entangled in bureaucracy? How much funding for inspections can be cut with impunity? How many safety shortcuts, such as those in Flint, can be tolerated? How long may the delay of critical repairs be justified for non-safety considerations, however worthy? (The stretch of I-70 in North Denver, finally addressed after some 13 years of repeated environmental impact assessments, comes to mind.)
Obvious and simplistic as it sounds, when the bridge or the building collapses, it’s too late. Infrastructure requires repair when no visible damage stands before us. “It’ll never happen” is not a plan.
As with any expert analysis, opinions on the urgency and nature of an infrastructure repair will differ for any given project, but as the collapse in Surfside and the “cost-saving” water measures in Flint viscerally showed, it is best to err on the side of caution.
“It saves money in the long run to take care of the problem now” may sound like a politically inspired excuse to spend staggering amounts on infrastructure. But we have all followed the reports on the dramatically rising estimates of the needed, serious repairs on the Surfside high-rise from they time they first came to light, in 2018.
Year by year the estimates jumped by millions of dollars. Assessments on individual owners began in the five figures and then jumped to the six figures. A lot of talk, a lot of reports, a lot of blaming, but nothing was done.
Boom! Now the building is gone and the lawsuits begin, while the municipality’s costs have already been incurred, with who knows how much more to come.
These are not even the worst prices of neglect. The costs in dollars are far overshadowed by two heavier costs: the broken lives and the confidence hit. This building collapse undermined confidence in government safety procedures and in civilian oversight bodies, such as homeowner associations.
Make no mistake, these human and social costs have economic consequences, too: lost productivity, and the fiscal implications of increased anger and distrust.
It’ll never happen, until it does. We hope the two sides in Washington take the obvious lesson and get together for a genuine effort at addressing the deficiencies in our national infrastructure; and that once they do, measures are put in place to discourage waste and fraud, and to punish them to the extent that they emerge, which they surely will.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
