Brown offered few specifics for financing deferred transportation maintenance on Friday when he unveiled his $113 billion state spending plan, other than to say he’d bring a bipartisan group of lawmakers and stakeholders together.
In its first congestion report card in five years, the Bay Area’s transportation planning agency said that average congestion — defined as traffic moving 35 mph or less — increased 65 percent in the Bay Area from 2009 to 2013.
His spending plan allocates $478 million for maintenance on the state’s universities, parks, prisons and hospitals, a tiny fraction of the $66 billion the state needs to spend to catch up with deferred maintenance, according to the state Department of Finance.
In 2006 California voters approved about $40 billion in bonds to address infrastructure deficiencies. About $5 billion of that hasn’t been spent. Brown’s Department of Finance says about $1 billion will be included in this year’s budget.
Driving just got a lot cheaper in America. The timing is great not only for American consumers, but also for America’s infrastructure. The Highway Trust Fund simply can’t keep up current spending levels without more revenue. Significant declines in pump prices have presented an excellent opportunity to raise the federal gas tax, while keeping pump prices lower than initially anticipated.
Shipping companies are seeking the fastest route to move Asian goods to the U.S. Midwest, with a growing share of U.S.-bound cargo arriving first in Canada. The increased business suggests Canada’s efforts to exploit some natural geographic advantages by spending billions of dollars on its West Coast trade infrastructure are paying off.
Congestion, labor tensions and tax concerns at U.S. ports have also spurred some shippers to look north. . . Canada’s two big Pacific ports have a natural geographic advantage: relative proximity. Prince Rupert, for instance, is the closest North American port to Asia due to the curvature of the Earth, and is more than 68 hours closer to Shanghai by boat than Los Angeles, according to its port authority. It also boasts one of the world’s deepest natural ice-free harbors.
In recent years, the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, which combined handle about 40% of all containerized freight for the nation, have faced rising competition. A widening of the Panama Canal will allow larger ships from Asia to bypass the West Coast and deliver more goods straight to the East Coast. In preparation, a number of ports on that side of the country are undergoing major expansions. The Jacksonville, Fla., port authority, for example, said recently that its Asian container shipments grew 20% this fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30.
In a letter to the Obama administration released Tuesday, the Agriculture Transportation Coalition of Washington, D.C., and its 61 signees said the delays at the West Coast ports, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, are having a “disastrous impact” on United States exports. Customers are cancelling their orders, the letter says, and getting new sources for their produce.
Like British Prime Minister David Cameron, Larry Summers sees warning lights flashing on the world’s economic dashboard. Summers, who served through 2010 as President Obama’s top economic adviser and was Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, said America should be acting now to shore up its economy, instead of celebrating its status as the healthiest patient in the global economic sick ward.
Shipping snafus on the West Coast caused by problems at two major ports are starting to take a bite out of retail.
The extension comes after recent bottlenecks at the port due to a shortage of chassis (or trailers that hitch to trucks and hold containers) and the influx of bigger ships coming to the port. On Tuesday, about eight container ships were anchored off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach waiting to be unloaded, said Port of Long Beach spokesman Lee Peterson.
Although NOAA forecasters predicted a slightly wetter year for the Southland, the outlook remained dry for Central California, one of the state’s most parched regions. Most of the middle of the state would continue in what the NOAA classified as “exceptional drought.”
. . . California, once the exemplar of modernity, has among the worst road conditions in the nation, a tenuous, but still extraordinarily expensive, energy grid, as well as an increasingly uncompetitive port structure. Thinking itself a youthful magnet for building entrepreneurs of all kinds – creators of new communities, manufacturing and logistics industries – California is increasingly viewed by other places, both in the country and abroad, as an ideal place to hunt for skilled people, expanding industries and investment capital.
Spending on transportation has not kept up with our growing population and aging infrastructure for many years. But now, state funding is being cut in half, and this transportation fiscal cliff will only make matters worse.
Providing California families and businesses the infrastructure we must build to make possible the future they want, will require a 15-year investment estimated at $500 billion or more. The question is not whether we make that investment. It’s imperative we make it: After all, more than 38 million people live in California today, but we’ll have 50 million neighbors by the end of the next decade. The question is how we make the investment affordable.
The State has to be smarter about the way it plans and finances infrastructure development. Our current approach is too ad hoc. Voters and the Legislature authorize bonds for particular programs with little thought given to how those bonds fit into a larger infrastructure picture. We need to think longer-term and more strategically. Along those lines, my office has proposed the State develop a 25-year infrastructure master plan that would prioritize projects and provide a financing blueprint. We still think that’s a good idea.
Long-term state and local infrastructure financing also should be more fully incorporated into the year-by-year budget process. It should be stacked up against other public services, prioritized relative to those services and funded commensurate with that priority. State, local, Federal and private funding sources need to be considered and carefully coordinated to get the best infrastructure for Californians at the lowest possible cost.
