The Grand Illusion
Owning a house requires continuing maintenance, especially if you’ve lived in it for years. We’ve owned our present domicile over thirty years (the longest time either of us has stayed in one place), and during that time, the house has required repairs and replacements of items like the air conditioning compressor, dishwashers, washing machines and driers, as well as repainting and reroofing… and much more.
All this is obvious, but the need for such maintenance doesn’t apparently occur to far too many local, state, and federal officials. The amount of foregone maintenance in the Forest Service and National Park system is staggering, yet the current administration’s present and proposed budgets for the National Park System only address (from what I can tell) less than ten percent of the more than $24 billion of unfunded maintenance requirements.
One GAO report found that DOD was only funding 57% of the necessary maintenance at twelve major military bases. Another GAO report found that 73% of all Air Force maintenance on Air Force aircraft was delayed, up from 31% in 2019.
This isn’t confined to the federal government. Here in Cedar City, roughly twenty years ago, the city built a civic theatre, which was badly needed. That theatre has been essentially booked solid a year into the future, but the city council underfunded maintenance, which resulted in major maintenance work requiring total closure of the facility for months.
The Utah state legislature appropriates funding for new buildings for state colleges and universities, but little or no funding for ongoing maintenance, one reason why the roof of the music building at SUU leaked copiously after any significant rainfall (rare as it is).
Everyone wants the newest whatever – from military aircraft to public buildings – but governments at all levels continue to ignore the maintenance requirements, which just might also have something to do with the problems aboard the Abraham Lincoln, not to mention the fact that the President’s maintenance requirements seem fixated on a ballroom, an unneeded triumphal arch, getting his name on the Kennedy Center, and of course, the slope of the White House helipad.
A fun thing related to this is, at least in Nevada, the state government requires HOAs to have a reserve study done every few years, and dictates that the reserves need to cover the expected repairs / component replacements. The reserve study is not a simple thing, and requires extensive and detailed reporting from good contractors.
In one part of our HOA the streets aren’t public, so the reserves have to account for street repaving / resurfacing, sidewalk repair / replacement, and other structural maintenance. The reserve study shows the expected life of the item (at the time of the study), the current state, if wear has accelerated, and when the expenses for repair/replacement are likely to come due. All of that then figures into what dues are required just to replenish the reserves to the mandated level. If the board then doesn’t set the dues as a level sufficient to cover this, they can be held liable.
While the government requires this process is followed for the HOA, from what I can tell the state itself doesn’t have to do this for itself. They effectively do the reserve study, but the legislature doesn’t have to set the dues (taxes) at a level sufficient to cover the costs.
The underlying problem is everywhere. You can’t take credit for keeping something running. But you can take credit for something new. If your resume lists maintaining anything, it is ignored. But if it lists built this or created a new process, you get the job. The star quarterback makes the newspaper but the groundskeeper never does.
You also can’t take credit for fixing a problem if it initially looks worse on paper.
If you correct a process so that it’s accurate and in the long run runs better, but it shows that the process was actually far worse than it seemed to start with…. All anyone sees is that after you were there things were worse.
The government never has enough money for what it needs, and, no, the current incumbent with his delusional whims doesn’t help.
But our host long since made clear the reason why:
“The problem is that before long every councilor would be voting for what’s popular, or what Commercers with marks want. Taxes and tariffs aren’t popular. So before long, there wouldn’t be enough revenue to pay for the popular things, and even less funding for unpopular, but necessary, services and programs like roads…”
– L.E. Modesitt, Councilor, pp. 189-90
This is a problem everywhere in the world, but especially profoundly in the US, where everything is complicated by individualism of the States and the ideation of private enrichment above social safety.
For example, last I saw 40% of all bridges in the USA are past their expected design life, and while under 10% are actively structurally deficient, around a third of all bridges need major structural work or replacement entirely.
I remember being shocked driving up the interstate in upstate New York, and seeing the amount of rusted and decaying overpasses – I think pretty much every other one was defective in some visible way, whereas the equivalent highway in Canada was in pretty good shape.
But it’s common everywhere globally that private industry owns public assets. Water companies are particularly notable – the cost of leaks is significantly less than the cost to repair ageing pipes so they just patch and ignore. In many factories it’s cheaper to pay out for injuries than to make things safe.
And costs constantly skyrocket because we literally can’t build them like we used to – the steel is different, the concrete is different, the wood grows too fast so isn’t as strong, and modern fabrication involves pre built components tied together rather than fabricating in situ. It’s arguably better, but mostly it’s less reliant on skilled labour because that saves costs.
“I remember being shocked driving up the interstate in upstate New York, and seeing the amount of rusted and decaying overpasses”
This! I drove through Pennsylvania and New York about a decade ago and was shocked by the number of overpasses that had chunks of concrete missing exposing rusting re-bar.
I found the YouTube playlist Not Just Bikes made on the ideas behind Strong Towns very interesting.
He explains how towns in the USA get into trouble with their maintenance budgets, for instance by the way financing for infrastructure and zoning regulations are set up.
Here’s a link to the playlist, if our host allows it:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa&si=PxLN2kr2_78oLbdq
When submitting budget bids to get funding for IT work, it was relatively easy to get capital which is amortised over several years. But going back to get current account budgets to maintain it were different and we are talking about £k rather than £m which was the capital allocation.
So you reduce what you can offer- say 99.9% uptime to 99%. And when things go down for more than 4hrs, you should hear the howls.