John Hennessy III,
P.E.
Today, cash-strapped U.S. cities and states are selling or leasing government assets, particularly transportation infrastructure. The sale or lease of such assets can be beneficial to the public; but the long-term nature of these deals makes them potentially far more risky than contracts to run bus service or repair city-owned vehicles.
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MANHATTAN INSTITUTE
The biggest capital project, by far, in many American cities is one that few of their citizens even know about and that almost none has ever seen: the legally mandated retrofitting of “combined sewers,” sewers in which storm-water runoff and sanitary waste from buildings are channeled into the same pipes to reduce or eliminate overflows of untreated wastewater into local waterways.
MANHATTAN INSTITUTE FOR POLICY RESEARCH
While states own a large portion of highly traveled roads, such as interstate highways, local governments are responsible for the majority of roadway mileage. Counties and municipalities, including minor civil divisions such as townships, are responsible for 3.1 million miles of roads and streets. Only 430,000 miles (14 percent) of these are part of the federal aid system. The remaining 2.7 million (86 percent) are nonfederal aid. By contrast, 72 percent of the 780,000 miles of state-owned roads are in the federal aid system (Figure 1).
Aaron M. Renn is The Urbanophile, an opinion-leading urban affairs analyst, entrepreneur, speaker, and writer on a mission to help America’s cities thrive in the 21st century.
“Fundamentally, we have to take a hard look in the mirror and realize that, to some extent, the systems that we have in place in America are a reflection of the values of the people who live here…The public needs to take a look in the mirror and say this is what we’ve chosen as a society.”
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