(The Philadelphia Daily News posted the following editorial on its website on August 29.)
PHILADELPHIA — Cuts in federal funds. Short-term and shortsighted stop-gap measures to compensate. Complaints by local officials gone unheeded.
The years-long run-up to what became the Hurricane Katrina disaster showed a failure to prepare and take seriously warnings about weak levees and other infrastructure problems.
It’s hard not to wonder if Pennsylvania is heading for a similar, though less life-threatening disaster after reading the recently released report by Gov. Rendell’s Transportation Funding and Reform Commission, which shows a history of years of inadequate funding for and attention to the public-transportation, highway and bridge systems.
The template is familiar: Repeated warnings. A history of neglect. Last-second funding Band-Aids. Cries from authorities ignored by those who can do something about it.
The preliminary report released last week tells of a serious transportation-funding crisis: operating revenue shortfalls of at least $240 million annually; federal operating funding decreases of $65 million a year, and a “hand-to-mouth” environment that has seriously compromised our ability to mprove or expand the system.
We’re all too familiar with the annual SEPTA funding crisis, which threatens service cuts and fare increases. The crisis, though, is statewide. Pennsylvania has more than twice as many structurally deficient bridges than the national average, and 35 percent of our secondary roads are rated “poor.”
The report doesn’t break new ground in showing how we got into this predicament, mostly through stagnant state funding and a drop in federal dollars. What it does do is provide an overview of the problems we will face if things don’t change. The report also includes recommendations for how to reform the system. Though it’s unlikely those reforms will help when the $412 million stop-gap funding that Rendell pulled out of his hat last year dries up in December.
The final report is expected to be ready in November, after the commission travels across the state to get public input on the next steps.
In Philadelphia, the hearings will be Sept. 15, 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, the ACP Building, 190 N. Independence Mall West. For more information, download the preliminary report at www.dot.state.pa.us/tfrc.
The worst disaster is the one that could have been avoided. Now Harrisburg lawmakers can’t say they haven’t been warned.