The Feds Don’t Maintain the Bridge

It’s never been an ambition of mine to master the ways and means of transportation finance. And I certainly have not. But at the moment, if the collapse of the 35W bridge is to be the takeoff point for a fresh look at taxing and spending issues, it may be necessary to master a few basics, so that we can at least try to be faithful to the facts rather than commanding the facts to be faithful to our ideological needs.

Here’s one such fact: The federal government pays 80 percent of the cost of building an interstate highway (it was 90 percent in the early days of the program). The state pays the other 20 percent.

But the feds pay little of the cost of maintenance and repair. That’s fundamentally a state responsibility. Hold that thought for one second.

Here’s a second fact: The feds pass big transportation and transit authorization bills about every six years. They have weird names. The current one, passed by overwhelming margins in 2005 and signed by President Bush, is called SAFETEA-LU (OK, wipe that smirk off, it stands for the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users). Anyway, the big winners in SAFETEA-LU were Arizona and Minnesota, which got buckets of federal cash for road and transit projects,  46 percent higher than they had in the previous six-year plan (if you must know, it was known to its friends as TEA-21).

So Minnesota is relatively brimming with federal transportation money during the reign of SAFETEA-LU, which runs through 2009, and the money is to build new roads and rail projects, not patch up old ones. My takeaway from this is that Bush administration stinginess has little to do with the bridge collapse.

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But on the same day that I became acquainted with SAFETEA-LU (and Minnesota’s good fortune under same) I came across this piece by Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress, headlined “Consequences of Disinvestment.”

Lilly does acknowledge right away that we don’t know why the Minneapolis bridge fell. And he spends half the piece talking about two other infrastructure problems, wastewater treatment facilities and drinking water that he says are being neglected because of Bush’s determination to starve domestic spending while showering money on the Pentagon. Lilly may have the goods on that point as regards the twin water issues. I’m fully prepared to believe him because I certainly do have the impression that Bush’s spending priorities are heavily pro-military and anti- most other things.

But that’s just the trouble. There are serious factual barriers to blaming Bush for the bridge collapse, yet Lilly certainly does blame him by implication bordering on outright statement. Certainly Lilly never goes near acknowledging either of the two key facts above.

Advocacy is fine. And Lilly, a longtime aide to congressional Democrats and committees, is now with an outright liberal advocacy group. But intellectual honesty requires that one acknowledge the key facts, even when they are inconvenient to the case one wants to make.

Because I know just enough to know that Lilly is giving me a highly selective tour of the facts, I can’t help but wonder whether I can trust Lilly’s discussion of the implications of Bush’s niggardliness for other infrastructure problems.

(I have a call in to Lilly, and will write about his reply if I hear from him.)

The Lilly piece is an example of a concept I recall reading about years ago in Harper’s (can’t find much trace of it online, I’d love to reread it and see if it’s as brilliant as I recall) called the “resonant chord.”

In advertising or political persuasion, it’s hard to convince people of an assertion that is inconsistent with what they already believe. But if some form of the pre-existing belief is already in the audience’s mind, the propagandist need only pluck that chord of belief and allow it to resonate, and the audience will fill in the rest of the argument.

Since most of the audience believes Bush’s misplaced spending priorities are undermining America, it’s easy (but misleading) to use the bridge as the  latest example.

This is one reason that Gov. Pawlenty is serious danger of taking mortal political damage from the bridge collapse. Maintaining bridges in Minnesota is his responsibility. He has been a no-new-taxes Republican. He did veto two gas tax increases that would have raised money that could have been used for bridge maintenance. His bridge people did know about serious problems with this bridge. These facts create a chord that is very prepared to resonate to the idea that Pawlenty is responsible for the disaster.

The picture of the bridge and the cars and the people in the river strums that chord. The burden of proof in such cases may be very low.