Another typical summer thunderstorm moved across Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston yesterday. Yes, it rained hard for awhile. This was an expected, predicted, and perfectly commonplace summertime weather event. Major portions of our urban infrastructure failed. Storrow Drive flooded. The Fitchburg line of the commuter rail flooded. McGrath Highway in Somerville flooded, as much as twelve feet (according to eyewitness reports).
Commonplace storms like this should not cause these kinds of problems. Local government has failed, miserably, in its obligation to build and maintain public infrastructure.
Our media has failed to convey the actual impact of decades of reckless tax-cutting and greed-driven faux-populism. Voters support elected officials who lie about the real and immediate impacts of ill-considered tax cuts in no small part because the media is unable or unwilling to publish the facts about the impact of those cuts.
While Damsel-In-Distress Rescued By Heroic Firefighters stories make great Herald front pages, the truth is that local government is failing. Yesterday’s flooding exemplifies the consequences of substituting pure greed for public policy, for decades.
We must do better. We must raise, not lower, local government revenues.
Cambridge was one of the communities where public officials did what can only be called a terrible job with yesterday’s storm. Flooding all over the city. Businesses flooded out with several so badly flooded that they will be closed for more than a month.
<
p>Cambridge has a budget that would be the envy of many, if not most, cities and towns. Over $400 million for a city of a little over 100,000. A school budget that works out to over $23,000 per student.
<
p>Cambridge has also gone on an infrastructure binge over the past decade or so. New water treatment plant that was highly touted by City officials during aquacopolypse – over $40 million. A new police station – over $60 million. A new main library – over $90 million. A new athletic complex at the high school – over $30 million. A major renovation of the high school underway – budgeted at $125 million. Major water and sewer projects around town.
<
p>So for Cambridge it is not about the money. But what could have been done if let’s say $40 million was spent on a police station, $60 million on a library, etc. You’re talking 10’s of millions that could be applied against infrastructure projects around the City. It would lead to a better infrastructure and additional jobs for those out of work, a double benefit.
<
p>Project this across the State and we could be undertaking many more projects to improve infrastructure if we only managed the existing projects better.
<
p>Yes, the storm showed that we need better infrastructure and better managed infrastructure. Some of the answer may lay with more local revenues, but we must also look at how the local revenues are spent to ensure that they are being put to best use.
<
p>….Whenever a gift from nature screws up the best laid plans (never mind vacation schedules) and new infrastructures, despite double checking, buckle and bend where they shouldn’t.
<
p>Yesterday, my poor spouse spent a fun day (for him) on the river, repairing the the new bilge pump on our boat, and he still got a call at 6:00pm from the marina to report it had sunk during the down-pore. And nobody knows why. They pulled it out to find the motor worked and both bilge pumps worked.
<
p>???
After all, we do get what we pay for.
<
p>As for Cambridge, I was amazed to find out its school committee receives salary and benefits, its election commissioners receive salary and benefits…in our town, none of these positions receives any compensation or benefits.
<
p>Also, frankly, the differential between the salaries at UMASS and the decayed infrastructure is something I find impossible to understand. Anyone else know that history?
<
p>Our public higher education system is 49th in the amount of money spent on it; do the private, elite universities serve the elite’s children sucking the oxygen out of public higher education? One wonders.
<
p>Similarly, do all the tax cutters drive tanks, landrovers & hummers so the degraded roadways and flooding don’t matter to them? One wonders.
<
p>Great post and photo, Tom. Thank you.
How is it even possible that they spend $23k per child per year to educate? That is close to twice the state average.
that are harder to reach, David. Plus, you know urban districts cost more than suburban ones — all the employees earn more just to get them in that door, and there are a lot of other costs that don’t exist at a suburban level.
I agree with your general thesis, but $23k?
and more than twice the state’s average per pupil expenditure.
<
p>http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/p…
<
p>There’s something funny about the figure. I’m sure it’s accurate, but something must be causing the per pupil expenditure to be that high.
<
p>Springfield is worse off than Cambridge, I think, but it’s around the average cost.
I’m not familiar with the other campuses, but Umass Amherst has good buildings (some really nice new ones), been proactive with most maintenance and is competitive to get into. It’s expensive with respect to other states, but the students make up the difference with fees. You should pay for what college really costs, hiding the cost in the state budget isn’t fair to other taxpayers.
<
p>College costs have outpaced base inflation and increased at an even higher rate than health care. We have made it easy to pay for colleges – and colleges have responded by making it more expensive. This is just the same as what happened with mortgages and had the same effect on the price of housing. A housing crash wasn’t pretty and a college crash won’t be either.
<
p>
<
p>Why, when it comes to college students, many of whom haven’t earned a dime in their life, should it not be “fair” for the state to help them out — when it helps out people who need health care, it helps cities and towns pay for services, it helps pave roads I’ll never even see, so much as drive on, etc. We must be for the common good and recognize that public colleges, like public infrastructure and K-12 schools, serve the common good.
<
p>Furthermore, when you get kids going into our public university system, they stay in Massachusetts at a rate of 80% (compared to a small minority at our private schools). That means they’re far more likely to be paying Massachusetts income taxes for the rest of their lives. If Massachusetts gets more of our students in our public universities, making them better funded, it’s the kind of investment that will pay dividends for a long time to come. We will absolutely, positively make money off of higher contributions to public higher education over the long run.
It’s not cheap, but you can get through school for 80K – or less if you also use the community college system. If you are a half decent student you will get a 10-15K Adams scholarship – so you are at 65K. Surprisingly depending on your income levels, some of the private colleges offer scholarships that make them even cheaper or free.
<
p>Not sure about the 80% statistics, but it might have to do with the majority of the students at the schools being from Massachusetts and the private colleges attracting worldwide.
<
p>
Yesterday’s storm was not some freak, 100-year, unpredictably intense surprise. It was a summer thunderstorm.
<
p>In my view, it is not “monday-morning quarterbacking” to hold ourselves (voters and elected officials alike) accountable when our government fails at its most basic public responsibilities.
<
p>No resident of this city should fear having their vehicle destroyed and their life endangered by a commonplace every-day thunderstorm. No resident of this city should fear being stranded underground by a flooded subway system after a commonplace every-day thunderstorm.
<
p>It seems to me that until we acknowledge that failures like this should not happen, we will never find the political will to solve the problem.
<
p>Oh, and sorry about your boat. Hopefully it won’t be too expensive to get it back in service.
You get a ribbon cutting and an accomplishment to put on your campaign literature. Fixing the roof or flood control doesn’t give you the same bang. Cambridge has the budget – they choose not to spend it correctly. I even think that Cambridge is one of the communities that spends under it’s Prop 2-1/2 limits.
<
p>
to prevent the MBTA from flooding is beside the point; the city of Cambridge does not run the MBTA, or Storrow Drive for that matter.
The focus seems to be local, but both MBTA and Storrow are state agents.
<
p>Now I frankly don’t have such a problem with a parkway flooding. It’s built through a park which is built on infill land. To make it flood proof is probably not worth the cost. This isn’t just a Storrow Drive issue — lots of parkways in NY state close with heavy rains too. They simply weren’t built to be 24/7/365 major highways.
<
p>As for the MBTA, well, they can’t afford the repairs after the flood, but they can’t afford the preventative maintenance either. They’ve got gajillions of dollars in capital projects on the docket, but they don’t have the money to pay for them. In my opinion, this is where the state and Fed budgets must step in — those two groups ought to be paying for the capital projects which (a) improve safety or (b) reduce risk of catastrophic failures like these. The MBTA can’t afford to worry about them when they’re just trying to keep the lights on, but this is clearly a problem which is sure to hit sooner or later.
<
p>
<
p>Flooding is rarely a local issue — I’d bet that it’s nearly always a regional effort. Drainage, impermeable pavement, loss of water-soaking green, etc. impact not just the community it takes place in, but anywhere else “downhill”.
Sorry to hear about your boat. To many, they’re like members of the family, might sound silly to some but it’s true.
He did and found some ring missing. Our boat is aptly named Knucklehead, I think but nobody at the yard was impolite enough to point that out.
More local revenue is necessary but not sufficient.
<
p>Taxpayers and voters can only act on what they learn, and most taxpayers and voters (sadly) get most of what they think they know from local media. When the media allows flagrant mis-statements about spending, budgets, and taxes to stand without comment — or when they frame disputes about objectively measurable realities as just another “partisan” battle, then we all suffer.
<
p>Until and unless the media helps voters connect the dots between tax cuts, maintenance deferrals, and failures like this, the vitally necessary investments needed to correct these problems will never be made.
Local government doesn’t want to see these kinds of failures, but is never given enough resources to do much about it, and stripped from being able to raise the revenue they need on their own (via prop 2 1/2 constraints). The problem here is not local government, it’s a federal government willing to spend more than half its discretionary budget on the military, while we live in the year 2010 with an infrastructure straight out of the year 1960. The problem is with state government, spending $1.5 billion a year on ethically suspect tax credits, when that money could be much better spent on things like local aid, public transportation and higher education.
<
p>When local problems happen, I understand the frustration and desire to go and criticize your local government for those problems, but it’s unfair to do that when their hands are tied behind their back. By criticizing the wrong people, we’re letting those truly responsible for this sort of problem get away scot-free.
The communities this happened in are well below their 2-1/2 limits – the communities could spend money to fix these problems without even hitting their 2-1/2 limits.
<
p>
If Cambridge wasn’t $90+ million under its prop 2 1/2 limits. So, unlike most of the remainder of the State, Cambridge has the ability to raise taxes without having to have an override vote.
<
p>Also, I used Cambridge as an example where some projects are built as monuments to the local government, politicians, whomever, when something a little less costly would have done just fine and, as an added benefit, would have freed funds up to be spent on other needed services, infrastructure, etc. I am sure you can find similar examples across the state in libraries, schools, etc. So if we build what is needed instead of what is wanted maybe, just maybe, we will be able to meet more of the people’s needs with the same amount of money.
we can better prioritize with the revenues we have first, which would then allow us to make the case that we need more revenues. For instance, instead of 6 deputies over at the DOT making 6 figure salaries, why not only 3, which is what Romney had. It’s that kind of stuff that just gets people going.
Government is what like 30% of the economy? How much more does it need to be? Don’t forget that the Copley Square Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, the State House, the Longfellow Bridge and the John Adams Courthouse were built when government was 2% of the economy. Which was the wealthier society?
According to what I’ve read, the rising severity in storms is a symptom of climate change and has increased radically in the last decade or two. Significantly, New England has seen something like over a 60% increase in severe precipitation events.