The Citistates Group

CURT JOHNSON: Congress has just increased the level of federal transportation spending by 42 percent, raising the annual allotment to $286.5 billion. While most state and local departments of transportation are populated with earnest engineers, there’s apparently enough misfeasance to ignite a growing cry to burn down these budgets.

Examples are all too ready. In Washington state, which has seen a whole agency melt down around a voter-mandated monorail service connecting neighborhoods and downtown Seattle, there’s now an initiative gaining momentum to undo the 9.5-cent fuels tax approved in the last legislative session. See this Seattle Times article: Gasoline tax fuels backlash. If voters agree, hundreds of transportation projects just vanish. Reports say it’s all about credibility.

Then dash across the country to the Atlantic states and witness the nasty imbroglio over the Connecticut Department of Transportation’s apparent massacre of one of those historic stone bridges on the Merritt Parkway, one of the few if not the only major freeway that has always made its journey through the countryside without overdone concrete flyovers and tacky commercial signs, frontage roads, and disposable development on the shoulders.

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DES MOINES — The hottest days of summer summoned 35 of the nation’s governors to Des Moines. The main subject was the growing realization that the communities of the United States are not graduating nearly enough of its young people from high school. And of those who do graduate, too few are ready for what’s coming next.

That reality reached high drama on Saturday afternoon when New York Times columnist Tom Friedman unloaded on the governors. Reprising his best-selling book, The World is Flat, Friedman explained how the opportunities for prosperity were no longer an American club. This is not a prediction, he said, it’s a present and growing reality. And here’s the bottom line — Friedman acknowledged that major business leaders understand this. Even often pandering politicians get it; they know the world has fundamentally changed. But, “Who,” he lamented, “is telling the kids?” Who is making sure they know that failure to get the best possible education is a sure ticket tying them to the bottom of the economic ladder — for life? The answer, Friedman says, is “no one.” Certainly not the schools.

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