When (Do) the Mega Projects Come Tumbling Down

I know, the recession is over. But here's the first line of a Seattlepi.com article this morning: "King County Executive Dow Constantine announced Tuesday morning that his proposed budget would eliminate all general fund support for human services." It would also cut ten percent of the sheriff's budget.

That's in response to the county's $60 million deficit. Seattle's projected deficit is now $67 million. The state of Washington, $520 million. Reports Bloomberg: "Washington has reduced spending by $5.1 billion in the past three years, Gregoire said last month. Yesterday, she said the state faces a deficit of almost $4.5 billion in the two-year budget cycle that begins in July." The cuts will come from social services, corrections, and community colleges.

KIRO quotes Arun Raha, the state's chief economist, saying, "In Washington, the job recovery this time around has been slower than in any of the previous four recessions. If you compound that with the fact that the hole we're in is the largest in living memory, you begin to comprehend the magnitude of the problem."

The irony, of course, is that the city, county, and state don't spend that much, proportionally, on social services to begin with. When Constantine zeroes out social services spending--sorry, battered women and anyone who has been raped--he's addressed about one-third of the problem.

But the state is pushing ahead with a plan for a larger replacement of SR 520's floating bridge--work is underway, despite there being $2 billion in funding missing from the $4.65 billion project. (How much larger? "The current SR 520 is 60 ft. wide through Foster Island in the Arboretum. The plan calls for an 133 ft. wide structure," wrote Mayor McGinn in a letter to a group protesting the new bridge's size.)

And of course there is the deep-bore tunnel planned to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The entire project is supposed to cost $4.2 billion. People seem to get blasé around such large numbers. In an interview explaining how a deep-bore tunnel is a "green" alternative, the City Council's Richard Conlin noted that there was only a $1 billion difference between the tunnel and the surface-transit option.

For that difference, Seattle could run a $67 million deficit for 15 years. I know this line of thinking--about priorities--incenses certain people, who like to think that budget line items were handed down on stone tablets. "No, that money is for transportation!" they protest. But the point these days is, there isn't any money; there's just a future of debt. 

"Washington, which has no income tax, has the eighth-highest tax-supported debt per capita at $2,226, according to Moody’s 2010 state medians report," notes Bloomberg. Our debt is not backed purely or primarily by gas taxes, either. (See Josh Cohen's breakdown of transportation financing at Publicola.)

Debt in itself is not necessarily the problem--for the long term, it's a question of anticipated return, a question of efficiencies, and whether we're not digging a deeper hole as we fail to maintain the infrastructure we've built. But it also a question, short-term, of allocation of available resources. If you force yourself to imagine the predicted incrementally slow recovery, lasting a decade--ten years of chronic unemployment and its concomitant ills, curtailed spending, foreclosures, homelessness--where would you direct $8 billion? Driving?