The nation’s infrastructure is us

The nation’s crumbling infrastructure was suddenly a local story in your community newspaper last week. The page 1 headline blared “Shelter Bay water line break required boil water advisory.” Less conspicuously, without water constantly leaking, was the page 2 headline for the town council meeting: “Town Council reviews local infrastructure priorities.” All of a sudden, the rhetoric from the far-off other Washington has come home: water pipes on both sides of the Swinomish Channel are at the end of their lifespans.

In 2018 La Conner replaced the water main on La Conner Whitney Road from Young to Mclean roads. In 2020 and 2021 the Town’s public works crew has worked overtime on Channel Drive repairing breaks in that water main. These systems, like Shelter Bay’s, date from the 1970s.

How is the Town or Shelter Bay going to pay to maintain and upgrade their infrastructure, water mains, sewer systems and roads over the next 50 years? And what about the bridge connecting La Conner with Fidalgo Island? All infrastructure is local, but few localities are prepared to maintain and improve, much less build new, on the scale that first brought these 20th century improvements to our little corner of the world in the 1970s.

Back in the halcyon days of Congressional bipartisanship, during the 1970s and 1980s, over $60 billion was committed for the construction of public wastewater treatment projects through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, effectively bringing La Conner, along with vast stretches of the country, into the modern world of sewage treatment plants for our flush toilets.

The EPA, as a reminder, was signed into law under President Richard Nixon, the president most protective of the environment up until Obama.

The commitment made by the federal government, that is agreed to between Congress and the president, for spending $60 billion in the1970s and 1980s is equivalent in purchasing power to about $193 billion today, almost 3.5 times higher. That was for one program: wastewater treatment plants.

Back then sewage was not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, but a problem to be solved for everyone in the community.

For decades the Republican Party has refused to adequately fund national programs, in part out of fear that Democrats would be credited with their success and in part fearful that the public, seeing that funding government programs improves their lives, would approve and clamor for more. Now the country is massively crippled by crumbling infrastructure from coast to coast. It is not the Democrats who are winning, but the Chinese. It is not the Republican Party that is failing, but our entire nation.

But trickling down to agree to traditional road and bridge projects is way too 20th century and totally inadequate to the needs of the moment and for our future. Now day care centers and hospitals and funding appropriate staffing is properly placed under the umbrella of infrastructure. That is neither unfair nor government overreach. It does not matter how we define the projects. They have long been needed and, like traditional infrastructure, long neglected.

In the 1930s the then still new utility companies, electrical and telephone, the latter a monopoly, would not bring power or phone service to rural America. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration thought outside the box and rural electrification and phone cooperatives were born, radically new and created only by federal intervention.

It does not matter what we call bringing internet to rural areas and systematically and adequately funding childcare. They have been desperately needed for decades.

Back in the days of three television networks broadcasting Fram Oil Filters commercials, the tagline was “you can pay me now or pay me later.” Now with 1,000 channels and more means of getting the message out, the basic truth remains: This is a problem that the other Washington can fix.