Angie Schmitt

Budget buster no one discusses

Network Administrator at Streetsblog , Apr 25, 11.

Tagged with sprawl, urbanism, development, economics

Across the nation, there’s a lot of hand wringing going on about how state budget crises will affect local communities. Will trash pickup be less frequent? Will senior services be cut? How will the schools be affected?

All of this obscures, to a certain extent, one of the major ways we got ourselves into this mess in the first place. For roughly 50 years, states have allowed and encouraged their metro areas to grow outward, building countless miles of new roads, sewers, and other infrastructure with little regard for the sustainability and efficiency of the new communities.

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Budget cuts are going to be painful in Ohio and Michigan and lots of other places. They were inevitable, recession or not, in part because this type of development is simply not sustainable, economically or otherwise. It’s unfortunate that the leaders in these states haven’t taken this opportunity to reexamine some of the macro-level policy decisions that led to the current crisis.

The more politically expedient thing seems to be talking tough about union contracts, or even transit and schools. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker is actually planning to expand highway spending, while taking a hacksaw to everything else. But budget cuts alone can’t help these states out of the disaster they have created until they acknowledge the huge public expense of building and maintaining sprawl. Until then, all this talk of “fiscal conservatism” is just that: talk…

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Source: Streetsblog.net, April 21, 2011

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