Government Bail Outs

While Congress contemplates various request for 'bail-outs' from the banking and automotive industries, significant requests from government entities have surfaced, including pleas from states, counties, cities, and school districts. (I have not heard of a township asking for money, but maybe I missed it).

Most of the requests are being made for 'infrastructure' or 'capital' projects that the jurisdictions 'need', projects that will 'put hundreds of people to work.' But I have to question why all of a sudden these projects need to be done now? In reality, these governments have been putting off these infrastructure projects for years in favor of funding special programs and pet projects because those get more media attention and good press for elected officials who want to be re-elected or move on to higher office. Spending such as this tends to feel more immediate impact on the community, while ignoring the much greater impact that failing infrastructure has on the viability and sustainability of a region.

I look back at the township and the status of some infrastructure projects when I took office in 2006. In 2004, the township paved 0.99 mile of roadway; in 2003 no roadway was repaved. Given that we need to repave 6.5 miles +/- in order to maintain a 20 year repaving schedule, these two years put us drastically behind. And why did this happen? Because the administration and elected officials chose to focus resources on feel-good stuff like brush pick-up and weekly leaf pick-up. They also raided the road department budget to operate the fire department.

But my point is that the township was not allocating proper resources to the road department so that they could maintain our infrastructure. Failure to maintain and repair our roads, storm drains, and other infrastructure is a costly decision, because the longer you put off infrastructure projects, the more costly they are to do. For the last three years, the trustees have unanimously agreed that we needed to refocus our attention on the township's infrastructure and structured the budget accordingly. Earlier this year, the trustees were criticized by some for not doing additional brush pickup throughout the summer storms. But our road department was involved in extensive road resurfacing projects and the cleanup of both Schlicker and Smith Ditches to prevent flooding. Despite the criticism, I believe we made the right choice to focus on infrastructure projects as opposed to aesthetic projects such as brush pickup.

Other governments have been doing (and continue to do) what the township used to do - putting resources in non-mandatory services that sound good, look good, and feel good, but in reality take needed resources away from maintaining the equipment and facilities that are needed to support keeping our roads, bridges, buildings, water, sewer and other systems in good condition. By asking for funds from the federal government, these governments are asking others to pay for their poor decisions and mixed-up priorities, while communities like Sylvania township are making those hard decisions on our own and paying for them out of our own pocket.

I am not in favor of the federal government bailing out state, local and regional government's failure to properly allocate enough resources and revenue to infrastructure projects. The voters of these communities elected their public officials; let those same voters figure out how and who should address their infrastructure needs. It is not the job of the federal government to bail these governments out, at the expense of all taxpayers.