The Bay Bridge in the San Francisco-Oakland area was closed last night after a crossbar and two steel tie rods fell from a section repaired last month, damaging three vehicles and causing minor injuries to one driver. Structural engineers and inspectors are working to determine how long repairs will take.

NOW on PBS host — and Blueprint America collaborator — David Brancaccio will be a guest on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss the incident and the overall state of America’s infrastructure (Live: Wednesday, October 28 at 9:25 pm EST).

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In a report from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, political wrangling can often get in the way of critical infrastructure improvements Case in point: The rebuilding of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Originally aired: September 29, 2009

Blueprint America — with The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer — in a story on how America’s highways are built and funded — often times at the expense of mass-transit development. Correspondent Rick Karr reports from Birmingham, Alabama.

What’s a Zombie Highway?
Rick Karr, Blueprint America correspondent

Let me answer that question with a hypothetical: Let’s pretend that the federal government has a program to help you improve your house or apartment. Lawmakers in Washington promise that for every dollar that you put up for construction, they’ll give you four dollars. It doesn’t matter how expensive the project turns out to be –- you’ll get four bucks in subsidies for every dollar that comes out of your own pocket. Until the project is finished.

In that case, would you ever have an incentive to finish your home improvement project? Or would the project keep shambling forward, like an extra in a George Romero film?

In the most recent Blueprint America piece for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, we report on a highway program that reform advocates say works exactly like the home improvement scenario.

The Appalachian Development Highway System was authorized by President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s. The idea was to help nine Appalachian states build about 2,300 miles of highways to improve economic conditions in some of the poorest parts of the country. The federal government agreed to put up four dollars for every dollar the states would spend.

Forty-five years later, the program has expanded to 13 states, and more than 3,000 miles –- and counting. As environmental lawyer and highway-funding reform advocate David Burwell told us, under the system –- known as “cost-to-complete” –- states have an incentive to add more and more highways to the program, build them as expensively as possible –- and never finish them, because doing so would “turn off that federal spigot of money.”

Our case study is one of the newest additions to the Appalachian system: Birmingham, Alabama’s proposed Northern Beltline, a 52-mile stretch of interstate that would wind through the hills north of the city. The cost to taxpayers would be at least $3.327 billion dollars. The State of Alabama would put up its share of $665 million, while taxpayers from the other 49 states and the District of Columbia would cover the lion’s share of the remaining $2.662 billion.

Advocates for the highway say Birmingham needs it to boost economic development. They point to the growth that sprung up along the city’s southern beltline. They also argue that the new road would speed traffic through the region.

Opponents look at the growth along the southern beltline with horror, and argue that it’s exactly the opposite of what Birmingham needs. “We have built enough Interstates to kill our inner cities,” says Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford. “We don’t need more interstates. We’re going to need high speed public transportation. But we’re always spending our money in the wrong places.”

It’s kind of our turn, so to speak.

That’s what Phillip Wiedmeyer, a leading advocate for Birmingham’s Northern Beltline, said when I asked him why taxpayers in California or Illinois should pay for the 52-mile road through the hills north of the Alabama city. (Roughly 80 percent of the road’s cost –- or about $2.5 billion –- will be covered by taxpayers who don’t live in Alabama.) The explanation behind Wiedmeyer’s claim is complicated. According to several highway funding experts Blueprint America interviewed, it’s also inaccurate.

Wiedmeyer is head of the Coalition for Regional Transportation (CRT), a group formed last year by the Birmingham Business Alliance (formally known as the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce) to advocate for “fast-track” construction of the city’s Northern Beltline. Wiedmeyer is also a former vice president of Alabama Power. He now runs an Alabama energy research center, but his official email address remains at The Southern Company, a parent of Alabama Power. CRT is one of two groups pushing explicitly for the road; the other is the Business Alliance for Responsible Development (BARD), a coalition mostly made up of large landowners, real-estate developers, and construction firms who vehemently oppose Birmingham-area environmental groups. We initially approached BARD for a pro-Beltline interview; BARD set up our interview with Wiedmeyer instead.

Let’s look at an exchange Wiedmeyer and I had early in our interview. Note that the clip is unedited, except to cut from his camera to mine:

Wiedmeyer makes a number of questionable claims in that clip.

Starting near the top, when he says:

There’s a formula that the Appalachian Regional Commission uses for developing the highways that they designated and so under the formula we get our share of it.

Wiedmeyer implies that the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) “designated” the Northern Beltline project –- in other words, that bureaucrats or experts in Washington vetted the idea of building a 52-mile loop of highway through the countryside north of Birmingham and added it to the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS). That’s false. ARC experts didn’t evaluate the need for the road, according to spokesman Louis Segesvary. “It was added to the system by legislative fiat,” he said –- that is to say, when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) added the designation to a 2004 appropriations bill, as we report in our story.

When Wiedmeyer refers to “a formula”, he’s talking about how the ARC divvies up its budget –- how much each state eligible for subsidies receives. And the Northern Beltline’s $3.327 billion budget threatens to overwhelm that formula, according to a Capitol Hill staffer with detailed knowledge of the dispute who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to comment publicly. Alabama’s share of ADHS funds prior to the authorization of the Beltline was six percent, according to the Hill staffer; with the Beltline added to the list of ADHS projects, Alabama will get 34 percent of that money. In other words, of the 13 states that are eligible for ADHS funds, one of them –- Alabama –- will eat up more than a third of the program’s available money. And again, most of that money is provided by taxpayers who live outside of the Appalachian region.

If it’s built, the Northern Beltline “will suck a lot of air out of the ADHS,” the Hill staffer said. “It’ll eat up project funds and keep other states from completing their own projects.”

That may be why House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN) proposed capping the Northern Beltline’s federal funding at $500 million in his draft of the Transportation Reauthorization (PDF; see page 168). The Hill staffer said that would force Alabama officials to seek the remainder of the funding through regular Federal Highway Administration channels, which would bring more federal oversight to the project. “The idea is to put Corridor X-1 [the Northern Beltline] back into the regular order” of federal highway programs, the staffer said.

Let’s move along in the clip. Wiedmeyer later says:

[T]he gasoline that’s bought in Alabama generates a certain amount of federal excise taxes, and those go to the Highway Trust Fund, and then those funds are then used to build the roads and bridges across America. And until recently we’ve been a donor state – in other words, we sent more than what we’ve gotten back….

This is what is known in highway policy circles as “the donor-donee problem” –- and it’s long been a source of debate and the topic of think-tank reports.

As I point out in the clip, federal data do not back up Wiedmeyer’s claim. According to a Federal Highway Administration document published in 2001 (PDF available through the Government Printing Office), Alabama has occasionally been a donor state –- in 11 of the past 35 years. Experts told me that’s typical, because states receive larger subsidies when they are in the midst of big highway construction projects and smaller ones when they are merely maintaining roads that already exist.

More recently, the data show that in 2007, Alabama actually got $1.20 in highway subsidies for every dollar its drivers paid in gas taxes. Over the life of the Highway Trust Fund, the state has received a subsidy of $1.12 for every dollar in taxes paid. That ranks Alabama 28th among all states and the District of Columbia –- right in the middle of the pack.

That actually undercounts how much of a subsidy Alabama receives, according to Ronald Utt, a senior research fellow for the conservative Heritage Foundation, because it doesn’t include subsidies for Appalachian Development Highway System roads. As a result, federal money for the Northern Beltline, I-22, Alabama State Route 24, U.S. Route 72, and I-565 make Alabama even more of a donee state.

When I point out to Wiedmeyer that Alabama is not, in fact, a donor state, he quickly changes tack:

Jefferson County –- where the Northern Beltline is going to go –- we have gotten 34 cents on the dollar from what we have sent in. So we have been –- this is a donor area.

I didn’t have county-level information at hand during the interview, so afterwards, I started digging. The Federal Highway Administration doesn’t track county-by-county data. Neither does the Internal Revenue Service. I asked Wiedmeyer to provide some backup for his claim. He sent along two documents (1 || 2) to make his case.

Four highway-funding experts who I asked to review the documents didn’t find them –- or Wiedmeyer’s argument –- persuasive.

Utt said the data, which covers the 1990s, is too old to be meaningful. “As a matter of course, if there’s only data that’s that old, I don’t use it,” he said. “I’d be skeptical about it.”

Others said the data didn’t answer the underlying question of whether Alabama deserved more in federal highway subsidies. “They’re mixing apples and oranges,” said a high-ranking highway analyst who works for a watchdog agency of the U.S. Government in Washington and spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “The documents look at state gas taxes and state highway expenditures. That has almost nothing to do with federal taxes and federal spending.”In other words, Wiedmeyer is conflating local and federal data.

Nothing in the data Wiedmeyer provided has anything to do with highway policy in Washington, according to a highway funding expert affiliated with a public land-grant university who spoke on condition of anonymity because he serves as a consultant to various states’ departments of transportation. “The bottom line is that to the extent [Birmingham-area officials] have a beef, they have a beef with the state, not the federal government,” he said.

Robert Puentes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, agreed. “I have no doubt that Jefferson County is a net donor,” Puentes wrote in an email exchange after reviewing the transcript of the interview and my email back-and-forth with Wiedmeyer. “But note that the county status is not really the result of the federal law. The federal law puts so much discretion in the hands of the state that it is really an indictment of the state.”

What is more, experts said it is in urban areas’ interest to subsidize highways in rural areas. “If every county got ‘its share’, there’s not going to be enough money to maintain roads in areas where there are fewer people,” the highway-funding expert affiliated with the land-grant university said. “It’s not at all unusual for urban areas to subsidize roads in rural areas.”

In other words, “even if you don’t live there, you still have to drive through there,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Utt.

Utt and Puentes agreed that the Northern Beltline probably does not deserve billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.

“I am highly suspicious that the Northern Beltline will do anything positive to help the region meet any kind of economic competitiveness, environmental sustainability, or social equity goals,” Puentes wrote. “It will likely further serve to decentralize an already decentralizing metro area which flies in the face of [Wiedmeyer's] donor/donee argument. Just giving a metro area its fair share is not enough. There needs to be rigorous cost/benefit analysis applied to all projects.”

Utt said that if the road is built, only a select group would gain. “I’ve found that behind every road project is a landowner or developer who stands to benefit,” he said.

The most vocal opponents of Birmingham’s Northern Beltline have been environmentalists. They’re concerned that the highway will lead to sprawl and spread air pollution to the mostly-undeveloped land north of the city. But they’re especially worried about the effects that the road will have on two river basins –- the Cahaba and the Black Warrior –- which together provide most of the metropolitan area’s water supply.

Blueprint America spent an afternoon with Nelson Brooke, executive director of Black Warrior Riverkeeper, walking along Patton Creek, beneath Birmingham’s existing Southern Beltline. The stream is a tributary of the Cahaba, joining it downstream of the intakes for Birmingham’s water supply. Nonetheless, Brooke said it offered a good overview of the effects that highway construction –- and the commercial development that it causes –- have on streams and rivers.

Brooke and other environmentalists don’t want what’s happening to Patton Creek to be duplicated in northern Jefferson County. And they say the federal government is on their side: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wrote in 1997 that the chosen alignment for the Northern Beltline “has the most impacts on natural resources” of any of the alternatives that the State of Alabama considered –- disrupting streams at 14 crossings, impacting more that 4,000 acres of forest, and destroying 68 acres of wetlands.

Advocates for the highway have taken aim at environmentalists: A coalition of businesses that pushes for the Northern Beltline calls the green groups “no-growthers” who want “onerous regulations”. Nelson Brooke denies the charge. “I’m a strong advocate for low-impact development,” he told me. “The type of development we are seeing around our Interstates is the exact opposite of that. It’s sprawling. It’s in total disregard of the natural environment and how it’s disrupting it. And so I would say I am anti- that sort of development, but not anti- any and all development.”

Handwritten transportation bill outline by Rep. Jim Oberstar, Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee || Photo: MinnPost.com

Rep. Jim Oberstar (D., MN), Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has been at odds with the Obama Administration on when to take up his recently introduced transportation bill: THE SURFACE TRANSPORTATION AUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2009. Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood has called for an 18-month extension of the current law instead of approving a new law. Rep. Oberstar, however, has other ideas.

“We completely transformed the Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Transit Administration in this legislation,” said the Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman about the bill on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC public radio in New York, “We can’t ask people to continue paying for a program that doesn’t work.”

As Sec. LaHood told senior lawmakers on June 17 of the Obama Administration’s request, Rep. Oberstar called extending the existing law, passed under President George W. Bush, “unacceptable.”

Rep. John Mica (R., FL), ranking minority member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee || Photo: Washington Post

The transportation bill even has some bipartisan support – at least within the Committee – as ranking minority member Rep. John Mica (R., FL), among others, has endorsed the bill.

Still, the Senate is mostly opposed to the new legislation – following the lead of the Obama Administration. After the bill’s introduction, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., CA), Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., OK), ranking minority member, endorsed the 18-month extension.

Sen. Boxer said the extension should be “clean as it can be, clean as a whistle … not with these policy changes, because it will in fact jeopardize a quick passage of this extension.”

The delay of new legislation would also postpone a vote by Democrats in Congress to raise taxes – most likely the national gas tax – to cover the almost 60 percent increase in federal transportation funding the bill calls for past the 2010 midterm elections. The Environment and Public Works Chairman said, “I will tell you that if you go out to the people of America and say (a gas tax hike) is the solution, they’re not going to buy it.”

THE NEXT STIMULUS

The stimulus package passed in February has come under debate as to its actual effect in creating new jobs and saving existing ones given June’s 9.5 percent unemployment rate. With some $120 billion of the $787 billion bill going to infrastructure – $27 billion for highway and bridge construction and repair; $8.4 billion for mass transit; $8 billion for high-speed rail; and $1.3 billion for Amtrak – areas with low unemployment rates are getting a disproportionate amount of stimulus funding, according to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Also quoted in The New York Times report on Transportation Stimulus Spending so far, Owen Gutfreund (pictured), author of 20th Century Sprawl, was interviewed in Blueprint America: Road to the Future || [watch now]

In terms of federal dollars for transportation, the decision on how to spend most of it was left to the states, which have a long history, The New York Times said, “of giving short shrift to major metropolitan areas when it comes to dividing federal transportation money.”

Two-thirds of the country lives in large metropolitan areas, which are not only the locations of rundown roads and bridges and public transit systems in need maintenance and expansion, but are also the nation’s economic centers and places of highest unemployment. But, according to The New York Times, far less than two-thirds of federal transportation stimulus money has gone to these cities and their surrounding regions.

Also quoted in The New York Times report on Transportation Stimulus Spending so far, Pat McCrory (pictured), mayor of Charlotte, N.C., was interviewed in Blueprint America: Stimulus Roadblock? || [watch now]

Still, President Obama has said the stimulus plan needs more time.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., CA) agrees with the President in seeing through the first stimulus package. At the same time, however, the Speaker said last week, “I am a proponent for bringing up a full transportation bill, which is a great jobs bill… right now I think that we have big issues with health care and how we fund that, and if we do go someplace, I’d like to see us do the transportation bill.”

If the new transportation bill were put into law, according to the House Transportation and Infrastructure

Recovery Act: States’ and Localities’ Current and Planned Uses of Funds While Facing Fiscal Stresses || U.S. Government Accountability Office

Chairman, then the formulas and mechanisms allowing states to potentially mis-fund transportation would be streamlined or done away with as the legislation consolidates 75 funding categories from the current system into just four categories.

The Obama Administration certainly agrees with Rep. Oberstar that the system needs reform. Simply, it may be another fight for another time.

THE HEALTHCARE ROADBLOCK

The fight right now: healthcare reform – the President’s top legislative priority. That is at least the signal from the House Ways and Means Committee, which is preoccupied with how to reform and fund the national healthcare system. As Rep. Charles Rangel (D., NY), the Committee Chairman, told The Hill, “You have to believe me. Everything I am doing is health, health and health.”

Any bills with taxes, such the proposed healthcare and transportation legislation, must go through the Ways and Means Committee. If healthcare has predominance over transportation, as Rep. Rangel has suggested, then the transportation bill is likely to not even be heard this year by the Committee. The Ways and Means Chairman went on to tell The Hill, “he can’t yet talk about how to fund the highway bill, but added that ‘it is very important and it’s on the front burner.’”

Blueprint America has found that communities — big and small, urban and rural — are, for the first time, rethinking their purpose. Is a city a place where people live, a place where they go to work, or both? What about after work, between home and the grind — is it a half hour by car or an hour by bus?

Do these questions even matter given the state of the national economy?

The thing of it is that the majority of our money goes to where we live and how we get from here to there and back again. Addressing those costs is the same as addressing the Recession.

PBS stations are producing radio and television segments, hosting discussions between policy makers and their communities, and offering further content online, all as a part of Blueprint America.

This New York Now report on WMHT public television — as a part of Blueprint America — looks at how state spending may relate more to power than to need when it comes to the New York’s aging infrastructure.

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WMHT, in Binghamton, NY, is a partner station of Blueprint America

To track New York City’s use of federal stimulus funds for these six projects and beyond, visit the NYCStat Stimulus Tracker.

At the time I-35 was built, the federal government and the state relied only on the seal of the engineer who signed off the project as proof of its integrity. But the investigation uncovered that the gusset plates did not meet engineering guidelines for 1967, the year the bridge was completed. Today’s Board meeting included discussion on the potential need for greater state and federal inspection of bridges. Both the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDot) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) conducted only “condition inspections,” looking for rust and corrosion on bridges. NTSB Acting Chairman Mark V. Rosenker stated that the Board will be making recommendations that future bridge inspections should also contain “design inspections” to look for structural deficiencies as well.

The I-35 Bridge was categorized as a “fracture critical” structure prior to its collapse. A fracture critical design means that if one major component of the bridge fails, the entire bridge could collapse. However, a fracture critical bridge is not necessarily structurally deficient. As of 2008, there are 622 fracture critical bridges in the U.S.

Watch the Board Meeting LIVE in Windows Media

Watch the Board Meeting LIVE in Real Video

Blueprint America correspondent Rick Karr interviews advisors of both campaigns on how a President McCain or a President Obama would address four major infrastructure issues: roads versus rail; the fraying electrical grid; poor internet service; and whether or not the federal government should invest heavily in infrastructure as part of an economic stimulus package.