Huge role ahead for local officials
It’s been reported that both Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo are gearing up to hire a “significant number of people” in the coming weeks and months.
The new hires, stemming from the mammoth $1.2 trillion infrastructure legislation passed by bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate and championed by the Biden administration, will likely add hundreds, perhaps thousands, to the federal payroll.
The jobs are needed. A great deal needs to be done, thanks to the legislation. The nation is on the brink of the largest refurbishing of its roads, bridges, railways, and sewer and water lines in decades.
The work ahead will rival those periods in our history when public works projects were at their zenith, during the New Deal, for instance, and later during the road-building craze that followed World War II.
States and localities should take heed. According to former mayor of New Orleans Mitch Landrieu, handpicked by President Biden to oversee the nation’s infrastructure future, “Our work will require strong partnerships across the (federal) government and with state and local leaders….”
A report by the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, reinforces this message. Local officials must prepare to handle an influx of new spending, the report says.
With so many new grant programs becoming available, Brookings asks, “do (local) officials and their teams have the data and community support to submit applications?”
“As the owners and operators of most infrastructure, (local officials) must design and build new assets, hire more workers, and mobilize their own financial resources,” Brookings points out.
The federal government will carry a significantly heavy load, as regards infrastructure. But, according to Brookings, “state and local officials (will) carry an even heavier burden.”
Just getting by will require nose-to-the-grindstone diligence. For a layman, even reading a listing of potential projects is a hard slough. In basketball terms, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act looks to have more wrinkles than a middle school fast break.
Local governments will be challenged. But that’s a good thing. The benefits, such as enhanced broadband connectivity, will be well worth the time and trouble.
The infrastructure bill, and Biden’s Build Back Better legislation currently awaiting Senate approval, are two prongs of a single thrust: to keep America, and American workers and industry, competitive, in a changing world economic order.
In that sense, the administration’s Building a Better America plans are more like the construction incentives for the interstate highway system in the 1950s and ’60s than in the relief from unemployment that animated the New Deal decades earlier.
With Biden cast by liberals as FDR, however, it’s the New Deal that is serving as the touchstone for the Biden initiatives. That’s a mistake. The two eras are dramatically dissimilar.
The first year of the Roosevelt presidency was the darkest of the Great Depression. With 40% unemployment in some parts of the country in 1933, how could it not be?
The unemployment rate last month was 4.2%.
Confusion arises, of course, from the fact that at the height of the COVID-19-induced economic meltdown in April 2020, joblessness reached 14.8% nationwide. (Unemployment among 16- to- 19-year-olds in the spring of 2020 was a depression-era 32% while white, Asian, Black, and Hispanic unemployment hovered between 14.8% and 17.6%.)
The great imperative in 1933 was to put people to work. Harry Hopkins, the era’s Mitch Landrieu (roughly speaking), authorized millions of dollars in work-relief projects in his first few hours on the job.
Told a project would work out in the long run, Hopkins growled, “People don’t eat in the long run – they eat every day.”
Charles Gallagher, the Connellsville man charged in 1933 with jump-starting local public-works jobs, told municipalities to submit projects that could be “started within 48 hours.”
Speed then, patience now. As Brookings pointed out in a recent paper, “rebuilding American competitiveness through infrastructure” requires “long-term patience.”
There is a political as well as a policy dimension to all of this. The problem for Democrats and Joe Biden is that patience doesn’t excite the political juices. Not once in the history of politics has the rallying cry, “Let’s all be patient,” won either hearts or elections.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.