INVISIBLE CHILDREN

The 35 W bridge failure will end up costing about one billion dollars (read below) and if our policy makers would wake up, they will see that it was about five hundred times more expensive than the requested bridge maintenance that would have kept the bridge in “pristine condition”**

Are we doomed to see our once safe city streets, superior schools and, child protection system, fall apart just like the bridge? As a CASA volunteer and child advocate, I am well connected to the benefits of taking care of children when they are young to avoid their collapse when they are juveniles.

Former Supreme Court Justice Kathleen Blatz states, “ninety percent of the youth in our juvenile justice system have come through child protection”. Identified and treated early, young children can be given the skills to succeed in school and our community.  Ignored because of our new anti tax paralysis, the serious issues faced by children in child protection are not dealt with until behaviors become uncontrollable and someone gets hurt (it is exponentially more costly to institutionalize people over their lifetimes than it is to give them the skills to lead normal lives). 

About the bridge;  Minneapolis City Pages September 5th, Economy In Freefall article quoted Governor Pawlenty as estimating the additional costs of gas and extra miles due to the bridge collapse at $400,000 per day (146 million dollars over the next twelve months).

An accurate calculation must include a fair minimum amount for the (lower estimate) 144,000 cars that used this bridge every day. Forty eight cents per mile is the IRS allowance for automobile deductions and this does not include the headache factor of stopped traffic and longer commutes that I seem to be experiencing.

Assuming an average of five additional miles for each car each way (some people take the longer 694/494 route around town and others drive fewer miles through downtown city streets or the 280 detour). Multiplying five miles each way for 144,000 cars per day equals 1.4 million miles per day times the IRS forty eight cents equals $691,000 per day, or almost twice the governors estimate.

The new bridge itself cost 235 million dollars.  The deconstruction and buying up of land around it for the new bridge was about 225 million dollars.  With no extra consideration for the ten to twenty minutes at each end of our commute for well over a year, we can honestly call this the minimal hard cost of the bridge failure.

Add the  460 million dollars for the deconstruction and the  new bridge  to the lawsuit settlements for wrongful death and injury from the victims of this disaster (which are being hidden by legal and political smoke and mirrors) sure to be a few hundred million dollars (thirteen people died and over one hundred people were injured), and using the Governor’s own figures for hard costs of additional miles driven would be about one hundred and fifty million dollars (thirteen months of driving) and a minimal value for the failed businesses (one hundred million dollars) as a result of failed accessibility, and a billion dollars becomes a realistic estimate of the total hard cost of not mainataining our bridge.

**New York’s twenty year veteran bridge engineer, Samuel Schwartz (NYT OP-ED 8.13.07) estimated that an average of 178,000 dollars annual maintenance would keep each one of his states bridges in pristine condition.

It was five hundred times more expensive for our public policy makers to ignore the advice of the bridge maintenance engineers than it would have been to listen to them.  Our own Governor and his Lieutenant Carol Molnau were repeatedly asked for maintenance money for the bridge over several years prior to the collapse, but denied it.  

Anti tax people have cost Minnesotans a billion dollars and killed and wounded one hundred and thirteen people.   

I am making the same argument for the children in America’s child protection systems;  For over twenty years they have largely become preteen mothers and felons as a result of bad public policy.

Three million children per year are reported to child protection agencies, 90% of the children in juvenile justice have come through C.P., and almost all felons have come through J.J. The cost of extensive institutionalization, the crimes they commit, their impact on our schools, city streets, and quality of life are profound.

Early childhood programs with more training and resources for child protection workers would save us billions in prisons, schools, courts, insurance, and pain as at risk children become functional adults instead of felons and preteen moms.

Home values within our inner cities are often half  (or less) than they would be in a safe suburb. The insurance estimates of crime alone in the U.S. are between one and one point six trillion dollars annually.

It is costing us a fortune to ignore the maintenance of our bridges, courts, schools, and children.

It is time to counter the short sighted and inaccurate assumptions of the anti tax people. Our quality of life has suffered terribly with these tight fisted and mean spirited people wrecking our bridges and ruining our children.

Start this conversation in your community, join a discussion group on this website (or start one of your own).

Onward and upward,

The KARA team