My question is what's the core goal. Is the primary objective sales? Or is the primary objective shaming cities into actually funding their road maintenance budgets.
> shaming cities into actually funding their road maintenance budgets.
This makes it sound as if there aren’t hard choices to be made and that budgets aren’t tight. Would you rather have smooth roads, clean water, or low taxes?
Road maintenance is expensive, and tends to get deferred because of lack of funds or more important priorities. This means that road maintenance gets even more expensive. People then like to criticize the city for not fixing things when it would have been cheaper.
We like the narrative that government is wasteful and stupid and has all the money it needs to maintain everything in the city. Sometimes it is lazy and stupid, but mostly (especially at the city level) it is not.
When there isn’t money to do work, the government doesn’t do work—even if there’s work to do. Until we allow enslavement of government workers, this will continue.
Counterpoint, deferring maintenance is a classic way to make an unbalanced budget look balanced. A realistic accounting would show that you are steadily headed towards insolvency, and the budget needs to be fixed one way or another. That could be increasing revenue, it could be decreasing services, it could even be reducing the number of paved roads if your muni is really in crisis.
I make no accusations of stupidity or incompetence. My belief is more along the lines of the citizens have unrealistic expectations, e.g. how many miles of road their muni can actually afford to run & maintain for the taxes citizens are willing to pay.
You hit the nail on the head. I worked for a poor local government. The highway department was always the first on the chopping block, not because their issues weren't important, but because they were the only department with a significant amount of money.
The leadership here is another issue entirely, but every county in this area all had issues with money and the first thing that the board members asked was what roads could wait until next year.
The highway dept wanted to fix the roads so that they wouldn't need maintenance every few years, but they couldn't afford to do it to more than one road. So even though it is much worse band-aiding the roads that need work, it's better than not being able to do any work with them.
