No one campaigns against infrastructure.
No one really campaigns on it, either.
In battleground Ohio, a state getting more attention than most this election season, President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney fill their stump speeches with talk of cars or coal or trade with China. They say little, if anything, about the roads those cars travel, the bridges that coal crosses and the ports through which those goods pass.
While the nation’s crumbling urban core might not be a bumper-sticker issue in the race for the White House, any big-city mayor or planner will tell you that aging infrastructure poses a long-term economic threat to metropolitan areas.
In the industrial Midwest that is key to electoral victory, the threat is pronounced in places like Cleveland.
Here, fears about the Inner Belt Bridge have moved Ohio Gov. John Kasich to seek a private-sector partner to expedite replacement of a rusting Interstate 90 span that plugs into the heart of downtown. The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority is asking voters this fall for a tax increase to shore up the Cuyahoga River and make other improvements.
Bringing the nation’s roads, bridges and waterways up to date would cost more than $2 trillion, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. And the U.S. Conference of Mayors has argued that federal infrastructure dollars be reserved for projects in the metro areas, not for what its members characterize as low-priority bridges to nowhere.
The Plain Dealer, in separate interviews last week with Obama and Romney, asked each how he would address the infrastructure gap as president, specifically with regard to the urban centers that serve as a region’s economic anchor.
Both recognize the problem. But they differ in their plans to address it.
A year ago at this time, infrastructure seemed poised to become a significant part of Obama’s re-election campaign. He emphasized the need for more investment in road and bridge repairs in his stalled American Jobs Act and by traveling in September 2011 to the Brent Spence Bridge, which spans the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington, Ky.
Though the topic remains on Obama’s radar, it’s not the centerpiece of his argument for a second term. Even so, he broached the subject when meeting with The Plain Dealer’s editorial board before his Wednesday campaign rally at Kent State University. When talking about partisan gridlock, he noted several issues that should be ripe for compromise.
“Transportation is another good example,” he said. “Historically that’s never been a Democratic or Republican issue. Members of Congress like to build things and show up and cut ribbons. We’ve got a whole bunch of deferred maintenance right now, and the construction industry is still weak despite the fact the we’re starting to see housing tick up.”
Asked specifically how his administration would prioritize such projects, city versus suburban, Obama replied: “I think that increasingly not only experts, but also voters, recognize the old urban-suburban-exurban divide doesn’t really make sense anymore. When you look at states here in the Midwest, cities are the economic engines for the suburbs.”
Obama favors an infrastructure bank, which would back private investment in transportation projects with public money. Projects would be selected based on how they would boost a region or state. But attempts to create the bank have stalled in Congress, and Obama acknowledged last week that “we haven’t gotten it instituted as robustly as we would like.”
The president said parochial politics work against his merit-based approach.
“There’s always going to be some dividing up the pie,” Obama said. “That’s the nature of Congress. A member is going to want something in their district, and somebody who’s on a committee is going to see if they can leverage a little bit more for themselves than somebody who’s not on a committee. That’s the way Congress works.”
Romney, interviewed earlier the same day, said his infrastructure priorities would extend beyond urban centers.
“Our infrastructure’s crumbling,” Romney said aboard his campaign bus after an event near Columbus. “It was built in the 1950s and 1960s, it had an estimated 50-year life, and you’re seeing a dramatic need to repair what we have and to expand our system to remove the choke points that are making it more difficult for our goods to travel across the nation.”
The former Massachusetts governor was noncommittal last year when CNBC’s Larry Kudlow asked him about Obama’s proposed infrastructure bank. Prompted by Kudlow, who said the concept “sounds like Fannie Mae,” Romney replied that he didn’t “want the government getting into more and more enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”
Both are government-sponsored companies that guarantee home loans.
On Wednesday, Romney said he favors public-private partnerships to fund transportation projects. Such arrangements, he said, allow entities to work together “to expand our infrastructure and then devote a stream of revenue to repay the public-private partnership.” The approach is comparable to how Kasich is completing the Inner Belt Bridge replacement.
The governor, like Romney a Republican, has instructed the Ohio Department of Transportation to recruit a private-sector engineering, construction and finance team to pay for the estimated $332 million project up front. The state would then pay the design-build-finance team with principal and interest. Kasich says it will be a first-of-its-kind deal for Ohio.
Plain Dealer Washington Bureau Chief Stephen Koff contributed to this story.
By Henry J. Gomez, The Plain Dealer
(Cleveland.com)
Published: Saturday, September 29, 2012, 6:00 PM
Updated: Saturday, September 29, 2012, 7:16 PM
