Pa. fuel tax meant for bridge repair went to state police instead (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Pa. fuel tax meant for bridge repair went to state police instead (2019)

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35 pointsensan16 comments

Just to explain the last three paragraphs of that article, what happens in town after town is that the anti-tax folks decide that there's no need to fund a local police department when the PA State Police is obligated to take over policing. There's currently no mechanism for the state to charge these towns for this service and their state reps fight any effort to put one in place. So year after year the State Police's budget grows out of control and infrastructure funds and fuel taxes are an easy way to cover the costs.

Every day I edge closer to the conclusion that local democracy and public participation is a net negative.

The more we insulate people from the repercussions of their actions the more we get perverse behavior.

Let the towns go unpoliced. Either everything will be fine or they'll quickly refund thr police like every other city that tried that is doing.

Boy do I have a great country for you to consider

So only one level of democracy?

The loss of local journalism is definitely a contributing factor to this. Politicians are much more willing get away with stuff if they know there's not a reporter in the back of the city council meeting taking notes.

The local newspaper in my city that's been there all my life is still there, and a few months ago, I was disgusted with the national media and thought, well, I'll get a digital subscription to support local journalism.

But (and this has been my experience with other subscriptions too) I still had trouble accessing what I wanted to read. I expected the paywall would go away, but it's not that simple.

I'm pretty sure that this was because they have some sort of tiered system, but I felt cheated regardless of how it might be rationalized. Bait & switch. So I cancelled.

As a PA resident, it’s interesting how other large states are able to get by just fine with fewer taxes than PA takes out of our paychecks (and adds to our receipts). Call it less of an anti tax issue, and more of a “the state needs to reign in its spending” issue.

> There's currently no mechanism for the state to charge these towns for this service

That's a poor excuse. The state police were underfunded and so they stole money from the bridge fund. They could have raised state income taxes or simply said "no" to the increased funding. Instead, because they couldn't charge people in Small town X for their police force, they charged the citizens of Pittsburg by giving them worse bridges than they paid for - to help small town X.

i'm unsure if its not a good thing to encourage local towns not to have their own police, but be policed by the state. we see many towns that basically have unprofessional police forces that are turned into revenue generation vehicles for the town. However, if one want to have the more professional state police take on more of a role, it does have to be funded and fighting against the funding is problematic.

I think the headline sounds like the police took all the money, but that's not quite the case.

> The department’s overall budget is $10.2 billion, and it allocates $2.5 billion to construction projects annually. Richards said, last year, $802 million went to state police.

And regular reminder that dollars are fungible, and despite theoretical earmarks, it's really hard to say that this dollar was supposed to pay for that. If the budget didn't work, they'd just push it around in other ways. But still, fixing bridges before collapsing would be nice.

The article I read about the bridge collapse says they have no idea why it did so.

"Tax and spend" sounds fine to me, but spending can't substitute for figuring out what needs to be funded!

If the bridge seemed fine, then first it needs to be determined just how anybody should've known it wasn't.

Ignoring this is exactly the sort of thing that hardens people into thinking taxes are always wasted.

The bridge was listed as in "poor" (the worst of 3 possible conditions) and in need of immediate structural repair since 2011. There are pictures of rusted-through members, like this one[1] from 2018 where a diagonal member has been replaced with a cable and some prayer that it doesn't end up in compression. Google Street view shows the west side missing lower diagonal bracing[2] compared to the east side. The bridge was scheduled for fracture-critical and special inspections every 12 months. All 4 steel columns were at condition state 4 (poor condition, higher numbers are better condition).[3]

We know why it collapsed, in general terms: it wasn't repaired for years. We don't know the exact trigger, there are so many bits that could have broken first it's hard to tell. It's quite possible the snow load, bus, and other vehicles were simply enough to overload it, since it had been derated from 67.5 tons down to 33 tons (26 tons on the sign in street view though). Those articulated buses used by PA DOT range from 19.5 to 22.5 tons curb weight, so the bus + snow load + 4 (or maybe more) other vehicles could easily have exceeded 26 tons.

[1] https://res.cloudinary.com/engineering-com/image/upload/v164...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4392955,-79.9003455,3a,75y,3...

[3] https://infobridge.fhwa.dot.gov/Data/BridgeDetail/22435238#!...

I have no reason to doubt your facts, you sound knowledgeable, but there is something that you left out, that is important context.

I knew to look for it because of the news article I previously read.

It is this: "Substructure Condition Rating (60) 6 - Satisfactory Condition"

I do not believe this was either the worst rated bridge or the highest priority, and surely there is nobody who deliberately let it happen, so there must be room for improvement in the management of PA bridges.

PA has 3353 bridges in poor condition, according to reports.

The substructure is the footings, essentially just the concrete bits in the ground, along with how well they're expected to work given the ground conditions.

I thank you for your useful links, but I feel like you're nitpicking or don't understand what I'm saying.

The substructure was rated 6, and the superstructure and deck were rated 4, which is "poor". Yes.

This document (https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/mtguide.pdf) appears to define the ratings:

"4 POOR CONDITION - advanced section loss, deterioration, spalling or scour.

3 SERIOUS CONDITION - loss of section, deterioration, spalling or scour have seriously affected primary structural components. Local failures are possible. Fatigue cracks in steel or shear cracks in concrete may be present.

2 CRITICAL CONDITION - advanced deterioration of primary structural elements. Fatigue cracks in steel or shear cracks in concrete may be present or scour may have removed substructure support. Unless closely monitored it may be necessary to close the bridge until corrective action is taken.

1 "IMMINENT" FAILURE CONDITION - major deterioration or section loss present in critical structural components or obvious vertical or horizontal movement affecting structure stability. Bridge is closed to traffic but corrective action may put back in light service."

If a bridge that collapsed was rated 4, and "imminent failure" is three grades below that, then I don't believe it's possible to avoid the conclusion that the process of rating and prioritizing maintenance has some flaw that needs correction.

But I wasn't relying on the technical details that I didn't know in my original comment.

I just was certain that the odds of all of the thousands of PA bridges being perfectly prioritized and this one being the precise bridge where funds ran out was essentially zero.

There is, and will be, a lot of arguing about whether funds that should've been utilized for maintenance were diverted for political purposes.

Something that has affected my thinking and made me more "squishy" as a Democrat is reading an article about how maybe the poor condition of the initial ACA website directly resulted from budgeting orders of magnitude too much money.

Kind of like, choosing the wrong person to develop your website is one thing, but if say up front the budget is a billion dollars, nobody who's honest will even bid.

As I said before, I still believe in "tax and spend" policy, but I am coming to think that overspending isn't just overspending, but also can ensure failure of itself. I don't want to read about the details of wasted spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I know in my gut what I'd expect.

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