The Repairing of America

Deteriorating roads, bridges, dams and sewers finally get some attention

When Ronald Reagan returns to Washington this week from his holiday vacation in the West, one of his first acts will be to pick up a pen and sign a bulky document. On the same day, a telecopier machine at the Department of Transportation 16 blocks away will simultaneously dispatch a 6½-page message to the 50 states, telling each how much federal money it can spend from the new 5¢-per-gal. increase in the gasoline tax. With that, the rebuilding of America will symbolically begin.

The bill signed by Reagan will provide $5.5 billion on top of the $11 billion already in next year's budget to check the perilous deterioration of the nation's highways and mass-transit systems. While the dollar total sounds impressive, it actually amounts to little more than a federal finger in the fragile dike holding back a tide of decay that threatens to overwhelm the country's neglected network of roads, bridges, dams, rails, water and sewer pipes. The erosion is so far advanced that Amitai Etzioni, director of the independent Center for Policy Research in Manhattan, warns that the U.S. has become "an underdeveloping country, with its modern economy in reverse gear."

Passed by the lameduck Congress and funded by sharp hikes in fees paid by trucking firms as well as the gas-tax hike (to 9¢ per gal.), the legislation marks an important shift in the way America regards its once matchless physical plant. For decades, politicians at every level of government tried to impress constituents by throwing available funds into dazzling new public facilities: a Faneuil Hall shopping mecca in Boston, a Lincoln Center cultural complex in Manhattan, a Gateway Arch over St. Louis, as well as fresh brick school buildings, downtown malls and late-model firetrucks and police cruisers almost everywhere.

Meanwhile, sewers and water mains rotted below ground, highways cracked under the pounding of 18-wheel semis weighing 40 tons, and steel bridges rusted into dangerous disrepair. Politicians looked the other way. Says Adriana Gianturco, director of California's department of transportation: "Nobody cuts a ribbon over a pothole that's been fixed."

Even now, when the extent of the problem is widely recognized, skeptics doubt that there is a genuine national commitment to spend anywhere near the amount needed for an adequate repair job on the nation's roads and sewers. The immensity of the task inspires a sense of futility akin to that caused by the federal budget deficits. In Iowa, the cost of replacing sewer lines in cities where there are no separate storm drainage systems (and where sewage sometimes backs into the streets after a heavy rain) is so high that, says one small-town public works director, "nobody has even bothered figuring it up. We can't afford it anyway." Indeed, it took the recession's rising unemployment rate to attract bipartisan support for the gas-tax bill, which is supposed to create up to 320,000 jobs.