Sometimes we wonder how the infrastructure of this great nation was ever born. Think about if we had to create all of our roads and bridges that crisscross the United States from scratch. We don’t even have the money now to repave our poorly conditioned roads, much less build new ones.
Surely the most complained about street in Columbia is Sumrall Road between U.S. 98 and Broad Street. Hundreds of cars every day pass through the area, which is lined with businesses, yet the price tag of $280,000 to mill and repave the half mile is more than the city can afford to fix.
This is not just a Columbia or even Mississippi thing but a nationwide problem. For one thing, increased regulations have greatly increased the cost of building things. That goes from environmental and engineering requirements to a minimum wage for construction workers. Not that those things are all bad; they generally ensure that the roads we do build are safe.
For example, during the construction of one of America’s infrastructure marvels, the Hoover dam, 112 people died between 1922 and 1935. A memorial inscription at the site near Las Vegas reads, “They died to make the desert bloom.”
Today, that level of death would not be tolerated. The project would be shut down until the safety issues could be addressed, and the lawsuits from the families of the deceased would bankrupt the contractors.
On one hand, that shows we place a high value on human life, which is a good thing. But on the other hand, it prevents us as a society from getting a lot of things done that other nations that don’t value the individual like us, most notably China, are able to do. What we need is to find a balance between the two that allows for progress without scorching the earth and leaving a body trail.
An acknowledgment of our national inability to get big projects done is one of the reasons Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra hit home with so many people and swept him into the White House. And give the Trump administration credit for making plans to both pass an infrastructure plan and roll back regulations to shorten the time between when projects get approved and when construction begins.
“Regardless of what happens with the legislative package, I think one of the most important things this administration can do is take permit delivery times from what is now an average of 4.7 years down to two years,” Alexander Herrgott, the lead infrastructure aide on the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, was quoted as saying in a Wall Street Journal story this week. “I truly believe it’s politics-agnostic, and something that will outlive this administration.”
Mississippi will set itself up to benefit most from the decreased regulations if it passes a gas tax increase, giving it both the funding and the policy environment to make our roads great again.
— Charlie Smith
