Concrete. The lead story in the latest issues of the Register is about a settlement with contractors Mann Bros. for reportedly deteriorating concrete that Mann brothers installed beside some city streets.
It’s the sort of story that might, and should, be a lead story in a well-functioning small town’s local paper. It would probably merit some attention in any paper. It’s a front page story in the Whitewater Register.
It’s more than that, though – it’s the story anyone would want to read, and the only kind that some would insist on reading, here. If the front page controversy in your town is a story about how the concrete wasn’t poured correctly, or whatever deficiency led to this situation, then conditions must be pretty good.
The benefit of a story like this isn’t the tale it tells; it’s in the avoidance of all the other tales that might be told.
Mass Transit. Gas prices are up, and it costs more to drive. There are any number of private solutions to this problem. One would be for workers heading to the same destination in another city to carpool, or seek neighbors who need to go to nearby destinations. Government need play no role in these arrangements.
Alternatively, a community could seek grant money, matched fractionally with some of its own money, to conduct a feasibility study for mass transit in the area. The study has the advantage of assuring voters that the matter is being considered, without the messy, and far more expensive, headache of actually subsidizing a public transportation system between nearby towns.
A mass transit study in an election year of high gasoline prices – with no certainty of a real system being established — is like free advertising for incumbents.
If mass transit comes to the small and struggling communities of our area, it will be a match for the environment – it, too, will be small and struggling. When all the grant money on earth dries up, grants will become local subsidies, and subsidies will require expenditures, and expenditures will require taxes.
(Excuse me for being so blunt – when I say expenditures and taxes, I should be saying the investment of our community, in our community. Sounds better, no?)
If we ever pay for a mass transit system, then there will be someone with a business that could not run on its own who’ll line up to offer his or her services to staff and equip that system.