Dale Conger, a P.E. in Houston, Texas, wrote a great editorial response to another article by another "can't wait to get federal tax dollars" writer at Civil Engineering magazine. The editorial is provided below.
As I read the special report [...] it struck me how quick we are to defer to the federal government in so many things. As a group representing the nation's infrastructure engineers, we are on record as looking for "increased federal leadership in infrastructure" and a need for a "federal plan" for a "national vision and focus" on "systemwide results."
Shouldn't we be working with our locally elected officials to provide this leadership and vision?
In most instances around our nation, infrastructure is a local issue, and it should be planned, funded, and constructed by state or local government. But over the years we have learned to defer to the federal government as it inserts itself into any and all issues concerning funding. Many local governments now use a lotto mentality toward planning infrastructure funding. The approach is to seek out federal funding and then sit back and wait for it to appear, courtesy of a local congressman. This, of course, does wonders for the re-election of congressmen, but is it really a plan for funding our infrastructure needs? I believe that a case could be made that the decline in infrastructure funding is related to the level of federal involvement.
As many engineers have found in working on federally funded projects and programs, the simple funding of a project is not the goal of federal involvement. These agencies react to the directions of Congress, which is not a body that can have any intimate knowledge of the infrastructure needs of our communities. Congress gives direction to the agencies in general program and policy terms, as well as earmarks. These then become the funding priorities that work to limit the use of desperately needed funds only to targeted projects. As the end of the day, those funds that really did originate from the local area of need are just returned with alot of unneeded and unwanted strings attached.
As just one example, the FHWA breaks its $42 billion federal aid highway budget into 4 broad strategic goals (5 if you count "organizational excellence" which is their term for their overhead budget) and 12 general line-item accounts, yielding 48 budget categories, which of course then have to be allocated to the states and territories. A project has to fit within one of thse budget programs to receive funding. So a project that actually has a higher need than another can go wanting because it does not fit the category in which funds might be available. This is after spending years in a planning and environmental process that hinders so many of our needed infrastructure projects these days. And this agency is only 1 of 14 covered by the DOT.
So do we as a professional society [ASCE] really need to be advocating the expansion of the system? Have we explored what the nation would be like if the FHWA disappeared and all of those highway dollars just stayed within the state DOTs? Now that would make for an interesting article."
Abolish the FHWA's funding function and return all those tax dollars to the states for their DOTs, now that is a great idea. How many tax dollars are lost in the system and lost to federal overhead costs as the feds manage and oversee a re-distribution of this money? I wonder.
Samuel Staley of National Review had this suggestion:
"Federal policy should be defined by constitutional principles and the concept that was the cornerstone of the justification for federal funding of the Interstate Highway System: interstate commerce. Congress should narrow the scope of federal transportation policy priorities to 4 core principles:
1) Fund only projects that have true interstate commerce ramnifications.
2) Fund only projects that have a significant impact on the national transportation system.
3) Enable state and private sector financing for transportation projects to leverage and in some cases substitute for national taxpayer funding.
4) Fund research into safety and technology that is beyond the scope and capability of state DOTs.
