OurFuture.org Blogs: Harry Moroz

Give Mayors a Role in the Obama Administration

Harry Moroz — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:58:28 -0700

This year's presidential campaign has not involved the "urban decline" rhetoric that rallied politicians - and policymakers - to the cause of cities in the mid 1960s and late 1970s. Instead, as Alex MacGillis pointed out in Sunday's WaPo, Senator Obama

"has adopted the framing increasingly favored by many mayors and urban-policy types - promoting America's cities based on their strengths, not their failings."

This framing involves a slight shift of perspective from urban cores to metro areas. In many ways, this optimistic view of cities as nestled within metros (which aren't as politically, or racially, charged as cities) is productive. Economics backs up the sunny view, as MacGillis notes, with the majority of the nation's GDP generated and of its population and jobs located in metro areas.

But the champions of the metro perspective fail to defend the political relationship - the partnership - that is necessary between the federal government and cities. In interviewing mayors from cities across the country, I have consistently heard that cities will not truly prosper until mayors are provided more substantive opportunities to influence federal policy. This influence would extend beyond calls for more funds for the CDBG and COPS programs to provide mayors and other parochial officials occasions to highlight model local policies and coordinate with state officers and, indeed, with other officials inside their metro area.

Mayors have already joined together in ad hoc groups to meet Kyoto Protocol targets and in official organizations like the Conference of Mayors, but they have little formal means to influence federal policy. If mayors are heard at all, they are heard to be begging for money; if they receive money, they often receive too little or are constrained in its use. Providing mayors a platform for influence, exchange, and coordination -similar to Senator Obama's White House Office of Urban Policy - would capitalize on the economic power of metro areas while restoring urban policy to its proper place in national discourse. At its best, this would mean strengthening the power and authority of mayors at the federal level--something that Obama's transition team should embrace.

In today's WSJ, June Kronholz points out that few mayors become president. They have often been overlooked when they should be empowered. Today, mayors nationwide overwhelmingly want the next presidential administration to reverse that trend.
A recent interview DMI's MayorTV did with Mayor Dannel Malloy of Stamford, CT explores the much-needed political partnership between cities and the federal government. Check it out.

For similar video interviews, visit MayorTV.

Talking Cities: A Video Letter from the Nation's Mayors

Harry Moroz — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:45:09 -0700

As final preparations for the last presidential debate are made – water glasses weighed and secret memoranda consulted – both candidates have revamped their economic plans for the economic crisis now gripping the country.

McCain was uncertain, at first, about whether to release a revised plan. But even after deciding that certain “economic news and conditions” demanded such action, he seems to have omitted several critical elements from the proposal. No, if you were concerned, he remembered to include a cut in the capital gains tax. And yes, if you’re worried he was going soft, he will employ a surge strategy to prevent foreclosures.

What McCain forgot is perhaps less obvious, unless you’re Mayor Doherty of Scranton, Mayor Wilder of Richmond, or Mayor McLin of Dayton. Although the McCain-Palin team rallied recently in each of these cities – McCain even announced Palin’s vice presidential candidacy in Dayton – the Republican’s campaign seems not to have taken to heart their experiences in these swing state cities.

Indeed, the McCain-Palin ticket thrived off the rallies’ rabid crowds , but their economic recovery plan provides no aid for the struggling state and local, including city, governments that employ, provide benefits to, and protect the crowds. Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio all face midyear FY2009 budget gaps and city governments are increasingly pessimistic about their economic health. This is just one more example of the McCain camp’s failure to address urban issues.

Tonight is the final opportunity that both candidates will have to demonstrate their understanding of the importance of cities. We’ve put together a short video to remind the candidates why cities matter:

Beyond Cheney's History of Climatic Evolution

Harry Moroz — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:06:00 -0700

Despite an infuriatingly recalcitrant EPA chief and an administration that has suppressed major climate change research for the last four years, global warming is once again at the top of the nation’s policy agenda. The EPA’s denial of California’s application to impose stricter vehicle emissions standards late last year provoked a strong reaction from environmental groups and the debate was again stoked by the administration’s release last Thursday of research confirming human influence on global warming.

Though to most of us – including the U.S. Climate Change Science Program that authored the report – this is no great revelation, such an outright statement from an office under this administration’s control is somewhat astounding, particularly given Vice President Cheney’s unique interpretation of the Earth’s climatic evolution. As the first EPA administrator under the current President Bush, Christine Whitman, described, “The consequences of climate change are very real and very negative, but Cheney is not convinced of that. He believes…that the Earth has been changing since it was formed and to say that climate change is caused by humans is incorrect.” In contrast, the new report from the Climate Change Science Program affirms, “Studies that rigorously quantify the effect of different external influences on observed changes…conclude that most of the recent global warming is very likely due to human-generated increases in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Yet, Vice President Cheney has, as The Washington Post reported, shaped an administration policy more concerned with protecting business interests than following environmental law. Ever concerned with the wellbeing of the American public, he has worried out loud about the dangers of just “sort of run[ning] out and try[ing] to slap together some policy that’s going to ‘solve’ the problem.” Better to see how things play out, of course.

In response to the EPA’s denial of California’s waiver application, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson emphasized President Bush’s desire to employ “a clear national solution” to fight climate change, rather than “a confusing patchwork of state rules.” Indeed, President Bush signed into law a bill to impose stricter national fuel efficiency standards, though at levels lower than those proposed by California. Currently, however, he is threatening to veto the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act – now being debated in the Senate – that would establish a cap-and-trade system to reduce emissions. So much for a clear national solution.

But this devious maneuvering and self-interested denial is old news. What is new to the debate about human-induced climate change comes from a Brookings Institution report released last Thursday – the same day as the Climate Change Science Program’s report – that attempts to quantify the disparate carbon emissions impact of metropolitan areas throughout the United States. The research finds that “metro area residents have smaller carbon footprints than the average American.” Indeed, carbon emissions increased more slowly in metro America than in the rest of the country between 2000 and 2005.

That metro areas have smaller carbon footprints is not necessarily a great surprise, as one would expect densely populated metro areas to have a smaller per capita emissions footprint. Smaller living spaces, shared walls, and the proximity of workplaces all intuitively suggest less reliance on carbon-emitting energy sources. Yet, the great variation in the carbon footprint of urban areas demonstrates a more interesting and more important point: the population density created by cities is a necessary starting point for reducing emissions, but a host of other factors contribute to a diverse range of urban emissions levels (at least one of these factors, the weather, is out of humankind’s control, at least for now). As the report states, “Residential density and the availability of public transit are important to understanding carbon footprints, as are the carbon intensity of electricity generation, electricity prices, and weather.”

For instance, the extent of reliance on “dirty” energy sources like coal affects the size of carbon footprints. This means that the carbon emissions from residential buildings are much greater in the Ohio Valley and the Appalachian regions – Lexington ranks 99th out of the 100 cities analyzed – than in Seattle, which “draws its energy primarily from essentially carbon-free hydropower.” Rail transit ridership is also significant. New York, with its substantial transit system, ranks best on the list of emissions from transportation. Further, weather is a significant determinant of a metro area’s carbon footprint. Areas that rely on heating and air conditioning tend to have larger residential carbon footprints, while “the 10 metropolitan areas with the smallest per capita residential footprints are all located along the West Coast, with its milder climate.”

The Brookings report is significant because it both confirms the importance of cities as solutions to the challenges presented by climate change and, at the same time, suggests possible action to confront these challenges. The report emphasizes that the federal government must leverage gains made at the local level and step in where policies in different metro areas work at cross-purposes. This means that

the federal government should lead more decisively on matters such as correcting market failures, setting standards, and exchanging information. Its role in transportation should more strongly incorporate energy-efficiency and climate mitigation as important decisionmaking criteria while also reforming policies that presently favor energy-intensive modes over efficient ones. Similarly, the federal government should leverage its role in shaping the nation’s housing market by making energy an important component of its information disclosure, investment, and finance policies.

The Brookings report reminds us of the role that metropolitan areas can play in addressing climate change and its attendant challenges. Congress – and President Bush – should keep this in mind as they debate climate change legislation before recessing for the summer.

Virtually There: Urban Policy, Campaign Websites, and a Silent McCain

Harry Moroz — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:51:58 -0700

“We need to imagine just what a clean, safe, efficient, dynamic, stimulating, just city would look like concretely – we need those images to confront critically our masters with what they should be doing – and just this critical imagination of the city is weak.”

– Richard Sennett, “The Open City”

Campaign websites – like town hall speeches, candidate adverts, and whisky drinking – are fair game when analyzing the presidential candidates. Indeed, when a few big picture issues like health care or the Iraq War dominate campaign conversation, these websites can be the curious voter’s only entrée into a candidate’s views on niche issues. Likewise, when the ravenous punditocracy belabors the collective consciousness with stories of vitriolic pastors and gas tax holidays, the campaign websites can be the honest voter’s only escape to meaningful policy, disassociated from reality as it may be.

That is why I feel so comfortable applauding Senator Obama’s recent addition of an “Urban Policy” tab to the dropdown menu in the upper-left-hand section of the horizontal toolbar labeled “Issues” on his campaign website. In fact, Obama had several months ago released an initial urban plan that called for a White House Office of Urban Policy, “promise neighborhoods” to combat concentrated poverty, increased money for reverse commuters, and an affordable housing trust fund. Senator Clinton, too, had released a plan for “revitalizing our cities” that called for increased funding for early education, green buildings and green jobs, and infrastructure. Both candidates’ plans would revive helpful programs that have been left, as Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta might put it, to shrivel up and die. Fair enough.

Yet, the most striking characteristic of the candidates’ plans – at least before Senator Obama’s cybernautic policy adjustment – was a question each plan begged simultaneously: If cities are so decrepit, such bastions of poverty and social decline, why seek urban renewal at all? Why shouldn’t we just lace up our hiking boots, ditch our metro cards, and head for Appalachia (not that Senator Obama is likely to join us there)?

Senator Obama’s initial plan was characterized by a conflation of “urban America” with “urban poverty” that was so overt as to seem almost an oversight. After a somewhat encouraging title – “Changing the Odds for Urban America” – the plan’s first sentence ditches America and heads straight for poverty: we are informed that Senator Obama knows “urban poverty” from firsthand experience and will lead “a new federal approach to America’s high-poverty areas…” Like Senator Obama, Senator Clinton proposes positive policies for urban areas. But her plan then frames the policies by saying, “many of our cities are struggling, with lagging education systems, crumbling infrastructure, unemployment and crime.” When we read her calls for early childhood programs, investment in green cities, and increased CDBG funding, we can’t help but have crumbling schools, crumbling bridges, and crumbling housing projects in mind.

But in the last week – after lamentations from Politico, the Mayors of Philadelphia and Scranton and Cleveland, NPR, the Brookings Institution, and the New York Times – Senator Obama seems to have gotten the message. He released, on that tab in the dropdown menu in the upper-left-hand section of the horizontal toolbar labeled “Issues” on his campaign website, a new urban agenda: “Barack Obama: Supporting Urban Prosperity”. The plan lays out many of the same policies as his previous urban agenda, fronting a White House Office on Urban Policy to coordinate efforts to strengthen metropolitan areas. This time, though, Senator Obama takes a page from the enlightening research of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program to emphasize that:

cities and metropolitan regions are key drivers of prosperity in the global economy and…opportunities for and contributions from all people and communities are critical to America’s long-term success. Cities house over 80 percent of the people, businesses, universities, and cultural institutions in America, and produce well over 85 percent of the nation’s wealth…Investing in America’s cities is really first and foremost about strengthening the economy because the people, assets and businesses that drive prosperity are overwhelmingly housed in cities.

Though programs to alleviate urban poverty remain in Senator’s Obama’s plan, gone is the portrait of cities as magnets of the decrepit, poor, and distressed. Instead, the Obama plan informs us that cities are worth investing in because they are already centers of economic activity and social prosperity. Poverty and bad schools and low wages and crumbling infrastructure and expensive housing all trouble urban environments. But metro areas deserve attention because behind the stereotypes of crumbling urban centers lie environments thriving with economic activity, intellectual invention, and cultural production. These environments contain within them the people and the ideas that are the keys to the recovery and success of the American economy.

Whether the presidential candidates or the media, or both, are to blame for the lackluster, though perhaps improving, discussion of urban issues so far in the campaign is difficult to determine. At the very least the Democratic candidates have responded to the few media and policy voices speaking out about urban issues.

The presumptive Republican nominee, on the other hand, is oblivious. Though one imagines that his non-existent urban agenda would make housing affordable for millions of Americans by eliminating pork barrel spending and would pay for mass transit infrastructure projects by making the Bush tax cuts permanent, Senator McCain has been silent on urban issues.

Unfortunately, his silence not only demonstrates a lack of knowledge of socioeconomic conditions in the United States today – and, indeed, has not only forced me to critique Senators Obama and Clinton simply because they have urban plans – but puts cities in danger of being completely ignored during the general election. Senator McCain’s ignorance of urban issues leaves no policies for he and the Democratic nominee to dispute and, thus, little political incentive to discuss cities at all during the general election. But perhaps this is to be expected from a Senator who has missed 60% of votes in the Senate since 2007. What could there be to talk about, anyway, besides tax cuts and pork?

Pennsylvania Hangover in Urban America

Harry Moroz — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:05:51 -0700

As we nurse our collective hangover from the political bender that led up to yesterday’s primary, with heads now clear we can reflect for a moment on what we learned. Beyond the various rhetorical foibles and overstatements that Wonkette and The Onion covered so deliciously – or was it so honestly? – there was hope on March 25, 2008 that the candidates would be forced to debate at least one serious issue on camera. On that day, the Mayor of Philadelphia Michael Nutter wrote an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he endorsed Hillary Clinton, not because of her “experience” or even because he prefers her healthcare plan. He endorsed her, he wrote, because of her commitment to cities.

While other mayors – such as Cleveland’s Frank Jackson – have endorsed Senator Obama for the same reason, the commitment of both candidates to cities has yet to be tested. Still, Mayor Nutter’s overarching theme rings true: cities are not simply a policy issue amongst many others, but the policy issue that the candidates must discuss. “These [urban] issues,” he described, “are important to the citizens of Philadelphia but also to people across the nation.” The data back the Mayor up: the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas contain 65% of the nation’s population and generate 85% of its GDP.

Mayor Nutter even attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Democratic candidates to hold an “urban-issues forum”. Interestingly, he was also “trying to get the folks who are running the debate next week to raise some of the issues [important to cities].” Do you think Mayor Nutter was referring to the debate question that asked the candidates to affirm their support for the 2nd Amendment or to the ringer who asked about Senator Obama’s flag pin?

Last week, MayorTV – a project of the Drum Major Institute and The Nation – interviewed Mayor Christopher Doherty of Scranton. In the lead-up to the primary, Senator Clinton had relied on Scranton (where her father was raised) and Mayor Doherty, who endorsed the New York Senator, to imply a contrast between her connection to working-class Americans and Senator Obama’s “bitter” comments. In his interview, Mayor Doherty lamented that there is “no voice for cities at the national level”. He claimed that we are haunted by a “hangover from the Reagan revolution”: the federal government and the programs it sponsors are viewed with unwarranted suspicion. This must change, the Mayor insisted, even arguing that taxes are the “best investment” a city can make. Indeed, higher property taxes in Scranton allowed Mayor Doherty to invest money in paving and parks, which ultimately increased property values much more than his initial tax hike. The Mayor believes that one of the presidential candidates can – and must – step out of the pack and focus attention on the benefits of urban infrastructure projects and regional transit. Ultimately, Mayor Doherty is optimistic. “Cities,” he assures us, “are coming back.”

Mayor Nutter’s op-ed and Mayor Doherty’s interview demonstrate that Pennsylvania’s leaders had urban issues on their minds, but the presidential candidates were simply too caught up in verbal karate to notice.

Throughout his interview, Mayor Doherty expressed confidence in everyday Americans’ sense that cities are the nation’s economic and cultural drivers. Americans understand how important cities are and mayors certainly do. Why don’t the presidential candidates?

High Contrast? Consumer Spending and Infrastructure in an Economic Slump

Harry Moroz — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:40:35 -0700

With the close of World War I, wartime propagandists found themselves unemployed, but with the enviable knowledge of how to manipulate millions of people to do their bidding. Led by Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, these out-of-work thought manipulators turned their attention from fueling the war machine to feeding consumer spending via the outwardly innocuous realm of public relations. Conspicuous consumption – first calculated and domestic, then instantaneous and portable – has been accepted and encouraged ever since.

It is perhaps because of this ubiquity of consumer spending that the economic stimulus package of February passed with such support and so little criticism. Why not give the lower and middle classes, the elderly, and disabled veterans some money to pay this month’s credit card debt and make this month’s mortgage payment, to take their husbands to dinner, and to buy their children a toy? Indeed, why not?

But the stimulus package, in its limited scope, at the very least suggests that prosperity – economic or otherwise – lies merely in one’s capacity to buy. Whereas social status might be defined by the quantity or quality of consumption, social class is now determined much less by income in the United States and much more by factors that influence quality of life: education, health care, vacation, retirement, access to the arts, financial security. Though Dr. Richard Vedder of Ohio University last year dismissed burgeoning income inequality at a congressional hearing on the middle class by demonstrating that consumer spending is quite evenly distributed across classes, one might wonder whether Dr. Vedder has simply been conditioned by Bernays’s gang. Shall we herald debt-financed consumer spending as the great equalizer, or shall we turn our thoughts to ensuring that as many as possible have access to that awe-inspiring middle class of doctor visits, university educations, and paid sick days?

Though Congressional Republicans winked when they suggested stimulating the economy by making President Bush’s tax cuts permanent, Republican presidential candidates McCain and Romney were deadly serious when they planned to rescue the nation’s economy with cuts in the corporate tax rate. After all, the United States brutalizes Americans with the second highest corporate tax rate of all countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Never mind that the actual yield from this devastating tax ranks 4th lowest as a share of GDP out of the 30 OECD countries because of the generous tax preferences that litter the Internal Revenue Code. This is nothing new: for years politicians have held out inducements to consumer spending, while allowing outsized corporations to swell, the wealthy to hoard money, social welfare programs to rot, and bad mortgage products to proliferate (regardless of whether we allow borrowers to suffer for their financial miscalculations or rescue them “from themselves”). Indeed, what else is the logic of ARMs but to give me the lowest possible interest rate now so that I can keep spending; be damned – by higher monthly payments, by owing more money than I borrowed, or by paying too early – whatever might come after.

In an incisive New York Times op-ed, Jared Diamond pointed out that the rate of consumption in the United States will inevitably decline. But, more importantly, he noted that living standards will not suffer a similar fate. Indeed, Western Europe’s rate of consumption is considerably lower than that of the United States, while nearly all measures of quality of life – those monikers of the truly middle class – such as life expectancy, health, infant mortality, financial stability after retirement, access to medical care, post-retirement benefits, vacation, public school quality, and support for the arts – are in fact higher.

This is all to suggest that the economic stimulus package signed into law last month was at best insufficient and at worst purposefully misguided. An alternative stimulus measure – proposed as an amendment to the first package, kicked around as a concept at least since last August, and endorsed by Senators Clinton and Obama – highlights the continued myopia associated with equations of consumer spending and economic stability.

As an economic stimulus, ambitious, yet calculated, federal infrastructure projects stand starkly opposed to inducements to consumer spending. Such projects require foresight and forbearance on the part of politicians and constituents, alike. They demand consideration of long-term regional and national goals that range from transportation to sewage to drinking water. They compel consensus on issues as popularly amorphous as climate change and as strangely divisive as freight transport. Such projects at once transcend political opportunism and at the same time are subject to the worst vagaries of influence peddling. These projects ask the question: where should we be in forty years?

Federal spending on big, significant infrastructure projects in order to stimulate the economy would be an admission that the creation of quality jobs, not the perpetuation of a spending habit, is what must, what will, cure the economy. Certainly, one worries that the federal government often spends unwisely. While this may be true, spending public money on public projects that benefit all or most or even many Americans – even unwisely – seems greatly preferable to abandoning our public health to an inexorable cycle of spending and debt.

The comparison – or opposition – of consumer spending and federally financed infrastructure spending might seem forced or arbitrary. Instead, why not shore up SCHIP or NCLB or any number of federal acronyms that have been hollowed out or mandated without sufficient funding? After all, it is these programs – not infrastructure projects – that most obviously exist to provide those struggling at the bottom of the economic pool with the entitlements that permit them a “quality life”. Still further, federal spending on infrastructure projects is likely to fail the well-accepted three-T test for an effective economic stimulus (targeted, timely, and temporary).

Yet, unlike recommitment to programs (rightly) designed to account for failings of the competitive market, a commitment to federal infrastructure spending would telegraph a comprehensive vision for economic development in a United States increasingly reliant upon its metropolitan areas. In a way that individual entitlement programs cannot do, garnering public support for an overhaul of the nation’s “modally siloed” and “rigidly stovepiped” transportation policy, for its aging sewage systems, for its cracking bridges, for its port entries and its canals and its broadband connections, would require the engagement of the American public in a long-term strategy for prosperity that would create jobs, improve economic efficiency, and nod approvingly at the simultaneous globalization and urbanization that currently define the United States’ economy. No doubt many Americans will struggle less or, no less justly, will enjoy themselves more, if only for a short time, when their rebate checks arrive. Fine. We deserve this, and much, much more.

The Age of Infrastructure

Harry Moroz — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:47:00 -0800

Perhaps because national infrastructure is so amenable to physiological comparison – highways are the nation’s bloodstream, its sewage systems the digestive tract, its bridges synapses – it is also subject, at least in journalistic cliché, to one of life’s few inevitabilities: aging.

Much of the evidence for this “infrastructural maturity” results from a 2005 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) that gave America’s infrastructure an average of a D on its Infrastructure Report Card. Grades ranged from a D- for drinking water systems (there is a wide funding gap for improvements, particularly in urban centers) and navigable waterways (half the nation’s locks are functionally obsolete) to a relief-inspiring C+ for solid waste (the number of landfills has declined, but mammoth regional fills have replaced them). The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) outlined similar concerns in its 2006 “Guiding Principles for Strengthening America’s Infrastructure”: aviation traffic will grow 39% by 2016, freight tonnage will increase 50% by 2020, and severe highway bottlenecks have already increased 40% in the last five years, but the structures that support these systems are deteriorating. 13,000 fatalities result each year from inadequate maintenance of highways, $63.2 billion are lost to traffic on the roadways, and $9 billion are lost to aviation delays.

Despite the ASCE’s empirical evidence and our intuitive sense (when was the last time you sat bumper-to-bumper with an SUV or stood jowl-to-jowl with someone in the subway) that infrastructure is aging and inadequate, no large-scale effort has been undertaken to confront the problem in a comprehensive and purposeful manner. Even after a bridge collapsed in Minnesota , a steam pipe burst in New York City, and levees broke in New Orleans, attempts to mend our bridges, highways, and waterways still stall because of bureaucratic strife and ineffective funding.

What often hinders large-scale infrastructure projects is not the knowledge that such projects are necessary or the lack of technical skill to carry them out. Rather, when politicians and government agencies tackle endeavors of such proportions, priorities clash, funding streams are challenged, and reputations are put on the line (For an international example, see Chile’s Transantiago bus service. Transantiago was designed to be self-financing, but is now expected to cost $40 million a month.). This means that massive construction plans become as much about individual personalities and personal ambition as about concrete, steel girders, and getting a car across the Hudson River. As Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution remarked at a congressional hearing on ground transportation, “The sad fact is that now that the Interstate Highway System is completed there is no coherent national vision for addressing a complex and conflicting set of transportation challenges. As a result, America’s transportation policy is adrift with no clear goals, purpose, or ability to meet these challenges.”

A unique solution to the bureaucratic and financial problems that often beset large-scale infrastructure projects has been proposed by Senators Chris Dodd and Chuck Hagel. On the morning of the Minnesota bridge collapse, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert pointed out, the senators announced their sponsorship of legislation to create a National Infrastructure Bank. The Bank would issue bonds to raise funds for infrastructure projects that would be selected based on a strict set of criteria. Applications would be accepted only for projects that cost at least $75 million, have a public sponsor (a state or local government), and are of regional or national significance. The Bank would then rate each application based on its promotion of economic growth, its mobility improvements, its reduction of poverty concentration, its environmental benefits, its potential to promote smart urban growth, and its regional or national significance (the criteria vary slightly for each type of infrastructure project).

The National Infrastructure Bank is a first step in creating a coherent vision of American infrastructure. First, the use of bonds – rather than a pay-as-you-go system that relies on yearly revenues – allows the federal government to develop a stable, long-term strategy for economic growth based on infrastructure improvements. Such a financing stream is less subject to political whims and to revenues, which fluctuate with the economy and with legislative action (and inaction). Second, federal funding for infrastructure – in particular, for the transportation system – is often diverted by state governments to other (sometimes) worthy, yet non-infrastructure, projects. Puentes of Brookings points out that the Government Accountability Office has called the federal transportation fund a “cash transfer, general purpose grant program,” and that “the U.S. code neuters the federal role and states specifically that the appropriation of highway funds ‘shall in no way infringe on the sovereign rights of the States to determine which projects shall be federally financed.’” The National Infrastructure Bank would ensure that federal funds are used by state and local governments for specific infrastructure projects, rather than diverted to make up for, say, underfunded federal mandates.

Perhaps most importantly, the selection criteria required by the National Infrastructure Bank would encourage the federal government to undertake projects that are significant to the country’s long-term well-being: rather than stop-gap measures to repair existing problems, such projects would take into account new challenges like climate change, the growing importance of urban areas, and the need for more affordable housing, while at the same time confronting the more typical concerns associated with economic growth (increased air, highway, and port traffic). A database with details about each infrastructure project and its funding would provide at least some public oversight.

Interestingly, political support for an infrastructure bank is growing. The day after Senators Dodd and Hagel announced their plan – and the day after the Minnesota bridge collapse – Senator Hillary Clinton signed onto the bill as a co-sponsor. A week later, Senator Clinton gave a major speech entitled “Rebuilding America: Improving Our Infrastructure” and endorsed the legislation, lamenting that we in the United States “are treading water and being swept backwards.” Her specific plan – like her economic stimulus package – includes a panoply of measures to repair the “backlog” of deficient transportation structures, to conduct safety reviews, to increase public transit funding (and to link these funds to local land use policies), to invest in intercity passenger rail systems, to modernize seaports, to increase funding for congestion reduction programs, and to improve broadband deployment. Senator Barack Obama’s proposal was – like his economic stimulus package – more straightforward. In his “Keeping America’s Promise” economic speech on February 13th, Senator Obama proposed a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to invest $60 billion in transportation infrastructure over ten years. He has previously called for increased Amtrak funding, high-speed railways, metropolitan planning to reduce traffic congestion, and improved transportation access for low-income commuters. On February 13th, a day after his speech, he signed onto Dodd and Hagel’s bill as a co-sponsor.

Additionally, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska proposed an amendment to the Senate’s economic stimulus package that would have directed $5 billion to states for infrastructure projects to be used before October of 2008. Senator Nelson suggested that “An investment in infrastructure and public works projects will not only achieve a much-needed boost to our economy, but will also promote long-term economic growth.”

Pronouncements by presidential candidates and a rather optimistic amendment to fast-tracked legislation are positive, if modest, indicators that a national movement to invest in infrastructure is mounting. Even relatively insignificant problems with infrastructure have received ample attention recently. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that two bridge inspectors in Georgia had been falsifying inspection records because of a fast approaching federal deadline. Officials were alerted when they noted that the two were inspecting bridges at a rate of 18 per day; the average is 12 per week. Admittedly, there are significant issues to work out with a national infrastructure bank. The European Investment Bank, an infrastructure-financing behemoth established in 1953 and a likely model for an American infrastructure bank, is criticized for its lack of transparency and its lack of social and environmental standards.

Large-scale public works projects will always be subject to conflicting priorities, funding difficulties, cronyism, and, of course, the mafia. Indeed, such infrastructure projects are designed to be patronage machines because they use public funds in part simply to create jobs. Yet, this is no reason to fall prey to the starve-the-beast philosophy of the current administration that has allowed American infrastructure to age and permitted a patchwork of private firms to profit from the spoils of disaster capitalism. Rather, emphasis must be placed on centralizing funding streams for infrastructure that can then be distributed based on a long-term vision of American economic success. Such a vision would emphasize the urban areas where most of the American population lives and from where most American prosperity is generated; would confront the environmental challenges associated with both aging infrastructure and new construction; and would consider the benefits and the dilemmas linked to the ever-increasing mobility of people and goods. With this purposefulness, infrastructure projects as fundamental and as forgotten as urban sewage facilities and desalination plants would receive the attention and the financing that they have long been denied. A National Infrastructure Bank is a means of encouraging this far-sighted vision.