Bob Kerrey's bridge looking worse after MInneapolis
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Among the fears and fantasies after the Minneapolis bridge collapse last week, Omahans probably needn’t worry that former Sen. Bob Kerrey’s pedestrian bridge across the wide Missouri will face that kind of structural problem.
The projected $22 million bridge, a departing “gift” of legislation to Kerrey from fellow Senate logrollers in 2000, might last until the next ice age so far as weight on the bridge goes since only hikers and bikers will be going across.
Fall down? Probably not. Political fallout? Bet on it.
Americans do not walk, they run screaming, to embrace the crisis of the day. Post-Minneapolis, it’s “infrastructure” – the safety of bridges, tunnels, buildings, pipes and other industrial components put in place by man and left to deteriorate.
And so now comes the question for senators and representatives. Why have you shoveled billions of federal tax dollars into silly boondoggles such as Kerrey’s bridge when the nation’s infrastructure needs fixing?
America is not all falling down around us. But 75,000 other bridges are said to be insufficiently maintained. And enough things are happening along the decaying 50-year-old interstate highway system and within an obsolete air traffic control system to focus citizen ire.
The Kerrey bridge already has had more than its share of hair-on-fire comments when and where frugal Nebraskans gather and in letters to the editor. The fury could impact Kerrey’s political future, if he has one.
Kerrey has done nothing to scotch rumors that he is thinking of junking what had been thought to be his final career choice, as president of New York City’s ultra-liberal “New School,” to return to Nebraska for a go at his old U.S. Senate job in 2008.
A bit of rethinking might be in order.
It was Kerrey’s bad luck to have a fellow Democrat senator blurt out that the $22 million was the Senate’s “gift” to a departing colleague. This kind of maneuver is one of those little secrets among the members that are not supposed to leak to the public.
But it embodied the truth about how some in Congress view as personal resources the billions entrusted to them. As for Kerrey, it was an equally revealing pointer to the mutual back scratching that he had to have performed for 99 other senators during his 12 years in Congress. The shorthand is, “Go along to get along!”
It needs to be said that projects such as the Kerrey bridge and thousands of others like them are not inherently worthless. They can be rallying points for aspects of community pride, if that is where a community wants to spend its money. Even better, privately funded they can be built and kept from deteriorating by watchful people who have a stake in seeing their investment is safe over a long period. Read Thomas Sowell’s column this week.
They should not be funded by federal tax dollars on the backs of truck drivers and waitresses nor through the costly, corrupt earmark system described above.
It isn’t that Kerrey’s pork is worse than some others. Sadly, it’s not. It’s just that around election time, it makes such a fat target.
August 2007
