Politicians, Police and Fire Unions Impede Long Term Progress on Infrastructure

The manner in which cities plan their emergency management is embedded firmly in the past. Fire departments are a relic of the past as around 70% of calls today are for medical emergencies and less around 4% for fires. (A recent study showed that 3% of all calls are for fire and 75% for medical emergencies in my home town of Midwest City, Ok.) Fire departments need to be renamed something like 'Emergency Response Department' and capital investment refocused towards more probable and predictable emergencies. One political problem is getting the police and fire unions to agree to support allocation of financial resources away from their members and towards other infrastructure. Another political problem is getting elected officials to propose and support financial outlays in the face of union opposition. Politicians often will vote in support of new infrastructure like jails, armored vehicles, and police military equipment, fire stations, fire equipment and new manpower before supporting new drainage and other non-union infrastructure. Who advocates for completing a drainage ditch that hasn't had a problem in a decade? Not the unions. It's a real problem because the politicians focus on short-term political profit rather than long-term payoffs. Cities led by short-term political thinkers, while reaping favor from vendors, unions, and lobbyists alike, become a problem for long term concerns like emergency, storm and flood control. There needs to be a big rethink on emergency management towards long-term thinking. But when cities are literally driven by short-term political concerns and competition for limited financial resources, conflict with police and fire unions (public unions generally) will continue to be a headwind. Until enough people demand change this problem will persist. Today the stop-gap for this kind of short-sided thinking is met with federal emergency dollars and bailouts of cities who didn't do enough to address their own long-term infrastructure needs. We know these events are going to happen, why do we pretend they will not? But as long as there is a federal 'daddy Warbucks,' there is little incentive to be responsible. This is a kind of logrolling after the fact. And what's worse, the USA has a $20 trillion debt bill that continues to grow. At what point do we stop rewarding bad behavior and insist that states start spending more intelligently? Never? From the story.... “At the one level it’s a political problem, it’s a resource and economic problem, but it’s also a cultural problem,” she said. “We’re not thinking about protecting these assets down the line. We don’t think in the future, we think in the present.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2022 PLATFORM

  2022 PLATFORM Here’s my own personal public policy platform. It’s not complete and is still a work in progress. It applies to state, local and national policies. This platform builds from one I produced in 2016 and 2020. I’m happy to say that some of those items were modified or taken off my 2022 because they were addressed by the governments in which they were directed.  CRAIG DAWKINS 2022 PLATFORM I believe liberty extends to every human being and the role of government is to ensure maximum freedom for every person by using vested power to protect individuals from aggression, both foreign and domestic, in preservation and respect for all human rights. Principles of Personal Liberty: 1.            Marriage Equality: Human beings have an inherent right to enter marital relations and contracts with any person who has reached the legal age of consent. “Traditional Marriage” laws, book and speech bans about LGBTQI...
Read more

Racism and Scapegoating Still Sells in America

Disbelief that it could was core to election outcome and shock. This is not another “they’re all racists” editorial. Nor would such an opinion written convince people to not be racist, or to even cause them to engage in enough self-reflection to recognize their own collectivist racism. This is about the process that we now undeniably see in the new “Alt-Right” Republican Party and the process of winning through scapegoating. It was a steadfast disbelief in the idea that there were enough Americans who could or would be galvanized by such messaging against Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, women, and others. Oh I know, some are thinking it’s time to stop reading, thinking I’m just going to call names. But of course I’m talking about the manner in which President-Elect Trump spoke during his campaign. Every single one of the points made above can be substantiated with unaltered video evidence. But there are some that support Trump who have evolved from, ‘he never said that’ to ‘well he ...
Read more

Stop Blaming the Russians for the Loss

Accept Responsibility for the Loss and Take Legitimate Steps to Reform Your Party  Stop Blaming the Russians for the Loss.... Even IF you believe the Russian hack was an organized attempt to tilt the election in favor of Trump, it could only be effective by showing the unvarnished dialogue about their primary process and incestuous relationship between the DNC and old line media outlets. For the first time in our nation's history, Americans received real time transparency, during a presidential election, of what was going on inside the DNC infrastructure with regard to how they tilted the outcome away from Bernie Sanders and towards Hillary Clinton. In a system of only two major parties, it's more than relevant to see how insurgent candidates, who are outside the party establishment, are treated by party leadership and operatives. What we found out was what was suspected. The GOP demonstrated the exact same antipathy for their insurgent candidate, only it was very public...
Read more