Washington – The Trump administration is eyeing plans to encourage the sale of public assets, such as airports and bridges, to help pay for a $1 trillion overhaul of the nation’s aging infrastructure, an administration official said Wednesday.
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In his budget proposal, Trump called for spending $200 billion over a decade to spur private, state and local spending on roads, highway stops and more of the country’s connective systems that need an expensive overhaul. The real-estate mogul-turned president who has courted the construction industry is now leading an effort to pay for the massive project with some combination of public and private cash. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has said over the past few weeks that the plan is being written by a 16-agency task force.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Trump advisers are considering enticing state and local governments to sell some of their assets by paying them a bonus for doing so. The proceeds of the sales would then go to infrastructure projects. In some cases, the private buyers could make profits by charging fees.
Department of Transportation officials pointed to a project at St. Louis Lambert International Airport as an example. Last month, Chao announced the airport would become part of a privatization test program paid for in part by grants and using some land to boost parking cargo revenue. The program “is designed to allow airports to generate access to sources of private capital for airport improvement and development,” according to the agency.
Democrats and some activists have criticized the still-being-written policy as a rush to benefit private industry without going through environmental and other vetting.
“as a rush to benefit private industry without going through environmental and other vetting”
That’s exactly the problem with government projects. Everything is bureaucratic and takes a million years and triple the price to complete. Everything needs studies and approvals from every yuckel. If the NYC sybway system was built as slow and as costly as the second ave subway do you think we would ever have a subway system. Just imagine if they needed to perform an environmental study of the smelly germy NYC subways. We have become an incompetent nation.
We need to restore the Robert Moses days when things got built and done. I know Lawrence Reisman disagrees that he was amazing. He claims Robert messed up willamsburg. Can anyone imagine how NYC would survive without a BQE, or without the baterry tunnel? Only a blinded liberal can believe Moses was bad. NYC would be a third world city if not for him.
We need to revive the golden era of robert Moses. We need to start building efficiently and cost effectively. Thats how we make america great again.
Direct management of public infrastructure (with governmental oversight), sure. Selling (most) public assets, seems very short-sighted and likely a bad idea in the long run.
Robert Moses could have built the BQE a mile or so west of Williamsburg and not put a gash through the neighborhood. He chose to build where he did. And one of the reasons the Second Avenue Subway took so long was that Moses blockedl funding of subways and other mass transit. It was only after he finally lost all his power ins 1968 that the project could go forward at all; it was halted in 1976 because of the fiscal crisis.
Robert Moses left his mark on the city, and not all of it was for the better.