Word: repairable
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Soaring costs of labor and materials have aggravated the road problems. In Georgia, where the state is able to repair and properly maintain only 10% of its 18,000 miles of highways each year, maintenance costs have risen 42% since 1977. Just to put a 1½-in. layer of new asphalt on 2,000 miles of highway costs $60 million. Minnesota Transportation Commissioner Richard P. Braun contends that at present spending levels, the state will not be able to rebuild its 12,000 miles of trunk highways until the year 2354, at least three centuries too late...
Sewers. The Environmental Protection Agency maintains that the nation must spend $119 billion by the year 2000 to handle safely a sewage problem aggravated by population growth and shifts. Even without providing for an anticipated 23% rise in population, $91.1 billion is needed for sewer repair and construction, as well as for upgrading sewage-treatment facilities. According to the EPA, it will cost $37.2 billion to separate the combined sewer and street-drainage systems that were installed by some 80 cities in the early years of this century...
Just how the first $5.5 billion will be targeted has already been decided. Mass transit will get $1.1 billion, partly on the sound theory that keeping more people off roads and streets helps reduce road-repair costs. States will get $1.7 billion for major resurfacing, repair and improvement of existing interstate highways. An addition al $800 million will be used to build the last 1,575 miles of the interstate system, now scheduled for completion...
...with what engineers stuffily call its infrastructure is overblown. They point out that road contractors and other construction firms have put a great deal of money behind a lobbying campaign to focus attention on the problem. It is also true that some estimates of the total bill for such repair work seem plucked from the air. Pat Choate, co-author of America in Ruins, for example, puts the cost at $3 trillion...
After decades of a "build and forget" policy abetted by irresponsible officials who were only too happy to hand on problems like maintenance and repair to their successors, the nation has no choice but to reorder its priorities and search for long-term funding. As Sociologist Etzioni has declared: "America had a big party that lasted 30 years. We overconsumed and underinvested, and now we have to pay the piper." - By Ed Magnuson...