New York State road work account raided, little left for repairs

Michelle Breidenbach of The Post-Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.) mined state financial documents to show the abuse of New York State's Dedicated Highway and Bridge Trust Fund. It's not "dedicated" at all. Years of raiding and borrowing have left just 22 percent of the fund to fix the state roads.

Patricia Decker and Robert Porterfield have found the construction project on the east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will be the most expensive project ever done in the state of California. While overall costs have been presented to the public, Decker and Porterfield report that the interest on the money borrowed to pay for construction will double the price of the bridge, making the final price tag about $12 billion. In several stories, Decker and Porterfield outline the history and costs of the span, as well as investigations into who profits most from the construction.

The investigation, conducted by the SF Public Press, first appeared in the McSweeney's single-edition newspaper, the San Francisco Panorama.

An investigation by Matthew D. LaPlante and Nate Carlisle of The Salt Lake Tribune found that "Logan City received repeated warnings that a privately owned canal that runs along the base of a steep bluff posed a danger to those living below, but the city failed to act on that safety issue, or even to warn residents who might be affected." Maintenance decisions for the canal are left to the private shareholders of the Logan and Northern Irrigation Company, although the city provides funding and staff to help maintain the canal. A recent mudslide in the area killed a woman and her two children.

"Of the 2.1 billion gallons of water that flowed through city water mains in fiscal year 2007-2008, 26 percent went unbilled - or unaccounted - for," according to an analysis of utility records by The News Herald (Panama City, Fla.).  Based on the retail rate of water in Panama City, the lost revenue from the unbilled water could be as much as $1.3 million.

An investigation by Matt Dixon of The Villages Daily Sun (The Villages, Fla.) revealed that fire hydrants in Sumter County have not been regularly inspected.   A request for maintenance records by the paper revealed that none existed.  Municipalities county-wide had been under the impression that the county was responsible for the maintenance of fire hydrants.  But County Fire Rescue Chief Bill Gulbrandsen stated, "Sumter County Board of County Commissioners does not own any public water utility system and therefore owns no hydrants. At this time, Sumter County is responsible to inspect no hydrants."  In an effort to rectify the lack of oversight, Joint Planning Agreements for hydrant maintenance are being adopted throughout the county.

The Detroit Free Press looked into the on-going problem of streetlight outages in the city.  "The Free Press spent three nights in March driving more than 200 miles of city streets examining the state of some of Detroit's 88,000 lights, at least 9,000 of which are out."  Response to reports of outages are met with months-long delays or no response at all.  "An aging system, combined with too few maintenance workers, has pushed the situation in the city to the brink. Detroit has four 2-person crews to make basic fixes to the city's 88,000 lights."

"The chief executive of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates the coal-burning power plant responsible for an enormous flood of coal ash in East Tennessee late last month, acknowledged Thursday that the plant’s containment ponds had leaked two other times in the last five years but had not been adequately repaired," according to a report by John M. Broder of The New York Times. Earlier leaks had been repaired inexpensively, but these were in a different area from where the dam failure occurred last month. There are plans in the Senate to push for new regulations on the management of coal ash, "including a requirement that it be stored in lined pits and dried out so that it could not cascade into towns and rivers."

Keegan Kyle, Grant Smith and Ben Poston of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analyzed more than 11,000 pothole fixes in the city of Milwaukee and found that the city repaired potholes at a slower rate in minority neighborhoods in the first half of the year. Using SPSS, the analysis found that minority areas on the north side were waiting significantly longer for repairs. Even major arterials in minority neighborhoods took longer to repair than problems in largely white residential neighborhoods. The reporters mapped all the pothole repairs from January through mid-July of this year and overlaid census tract data to find disparities.

A report by Jim Getz of The Dallas Morning News looks at the impact of population growth on dam safety. The investigation "found that suburban sprawl has encroached on hundreds of dams in Texas that were once in remote locations – including dozens in the Dallas-Fort Worth area." Development upstream from a dam increases runoff which may increase risks related to dam failure for those living downstream. " According to a News analysis of state and federal dam data and Census figures, at least 554 of Texas's roughly 5,800 low-hazard dams are now in areas where the population has more than doubled since 1990."

"A year after the worst U.S. bridge collapse in a generation brought calls for immediate repairs to other spans, two of every three of the busiest problem bridges in each state — carrying nearly 40 million vehicles a day — have had no work beyond regular maintenance," report Robert Tanner, Steve Karnowski and Frank Bass of the Associated Press. Officials attribute the lack of progress to bureaucratic red tape, soaring construction costs, and budget shortfalls among other things.