Expect help, not public works monuments

By Brian Eckhouse

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package could create or save 34,000 jobs in Nevada and hundreds of thousands more nationwide — a primary objective to revive the economy.

But don’t expect a contemporary facsimile of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. There just isn’t enough money in the stimulus bill for a network of ambitious roads projects. Nevada is getting $201 million. Most major roads projects cost at least that. So our money chiefly will be spent repaving roads in various stages of decay.

“One of the reasons we couldn’t get more is because we couldn’t put earmarks in the bill,” said a spokesman for Rep. Shelley Berkley.

Susan Martinovich, director of the state Transportation Department, says repaving roads before they further deteriorate — with money unanticipated six months ago — means that when Nevada gets future transportation dollars, officials could put them toward bigger projects.

Martinovich hopes Nevada, in a competitive process, will get upward of $1.5 billion more from the stimulus bill. That could provide $250 million for four new lanes on Interstate 15 between Tropicana Avenue and Blue Diamond Road, a widening project Martinovich believes federal officials see as crucial. The freeway is the main corridor to bring goods from the ports in Long Beach, Calif., to Salt Lake City and beyond.

Another project in Southern Nevada that could benefit is the addition of high-occupancy lanes on U.S. 95 between Rainbow Boulevard and Ann Road, at $155 million.

But even if federal transportation officials award the $1.5 billion to Nevada, the state won’t be able to overhaul its network of roads anytime soon. The overall stimulus package for highway projects — regardless of the final dollar figure — enables mainly stopgap measures. That’s true for most states.

Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at a Los Angeles-based free-market think tank, the Reason Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times last month: “Obama’s early statements on the stimulus, comparing its impact to that of Eisenhower’s interstate highway program, created a false expectation that it would be comparable to the New Deal in building great new public works.”

But Poole may have spoken too soon.

Although the stimulus bill may not do for American roads what Eisenhower’s project did, there is hope on the transit front. The stimulus bill includes $8 billion for high-speed trains and the president’s proposed budget includes another $5 billion.

Nevada will seek billions for a magnetic levitation train connecting Las Vegas to Anaheim in 86 minutes. “That would be a great leap forward,” said the Berkley spokesman, David Cherry.

The Silver State will be competing with other fledgling maglev projects and high-speed alternatives, including an express between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Wherever a project takes root, the country could finally have trains speeding in excess of 100 mph.

The Southern Nevada Regional Transportation Commission expects to get $30 million in stimulus money set aside for transit projects for a bus and bicycle hub in downtown Las Vegas, as well as park-and-ride facilities in the valley’s northwest and a bus line connecting downtown Las Vegas to downtown Henderson — all new projects.

President Barack Obama hasn’t been shy about pursuing bold government interventions akin to the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s program to lead America out of the Great Depression. Obama invoked Eisenhower’s highway system the day he signed the stimulus bill into law: “We are remaking the American landscape with the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower built an interstate highway system in the 1950s.”

He may be judged, historically, on the transit projects derived from the stimulus bill. Or at least he may hope so.