Gov. Peter Shumlin had plenty to brag about when he gave his State of the State address earlier this month.
The effort to restore the state's transportation system after Tropical Storm Irene's devastation was truly heroic. The combination of private contractors, state Agency of Transportation workers, and the National Guard rebuilt washed-out roads in record time, and at a lower cost than first expected.
Part of the reason for the speedy work is that many state rules and procedures were relaxed.
“Contracting procedures were modified; access to stone and gravel was expedited; dangerous debris was removed from brooks and streams as engineers worked together with environmental experts to get the job done,” Shumlin said.
This was proper and necessary in dealing with the worst natural disaster to hit Vermont in nearly a century.
But should the state disregard its rules, and the agencies that make them, in doing future projects?
Shumlin believes it should.
“If after Irene, we can rebuild over 500 miles of damaged roads and 34 bridges in four months for a fraction of normal cost, with dwindling federal funds in our future, we must apply those lessons to maintaining and rebuilding Vermont's aging transportation infrastructure from this point forward,” Shumlin said. “We will build faster, smarter, and more economically.”
Faster, smarter, and cheaper infrastructure projects are certainly a good thing. But the procedures that are necessary in a crisis should not be pursued in times when there is no crisis.
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In this newspaper's reporting on the post-Irene recovery, we have heard from many environmental experts on the potential impact of the frantic repairs to our roads to our rivers and streams.
A large amount of gravel and stone was pulled from riverbeds to fill in washed-out roads. But many fear that the excavation work might have inadvertently created more problems in the future.
River ecosystems are fragile, and when mankind interferes with those ecosystems, more damage can occur.
Take too much sediment and stone out of a stream or river, and you end up with a faster-flowing body of water.
Build up the embankments along a section of a stream or river, and you end up pushing flooding problems downstream.
Build too many parking lots and other impermeable structures in a flood-prone area, and you end up creating more river runoff and more flooding.
Some of the repairs might have to be redone to minimize their impact on the rivers and streams. And going forward, new construction will have to take into account how it might affect river flows.
Such concerns can't be glossed over in a desire to do things faster and cheaper. The flooding we saw from Irene can be blamed in part on previous ill-thought-out interventions in our rivers and streams, and the next big storm might cause even more damage.
Instead of aiming for speed and economy for its own sake, the Shumlin administration ought to shoot for doing things right the first time, and doing them in a way that doesn't just push the problem off onto future generations.
For his part, Shumlin added: “Projects that pre-Irene would have taken years got done in months; environmental quality was preserved; taxpayer dollars were saved; and roads and bridges were built to withstand the assault of extreme weather that looms even larger in our future.”
It should go without saying that the state should apply lessons it's learned from the urgency of the projects executed in the wake of the Irene floodwaters. And of course, future public works projects should be done with minimal extraneous red tape.
But when Vermont's infrastructure was rebuilt for 35 cents on the dollar, something, somewhere had to give. Time will tell the consequences of this hasty work. In the meantime, making emergency procedures into standard operating procedures? That's a reckless idea.
And by denigrating the value of “state workers bunkered in their individual agencies and processing paper,” Shumlin contemptuously wrote them off as money-wasting, expendable pencil pushers working counter to the interest of the state and its citizens. He dismissively pronounced that the regulations and protocols that they are obligated to enforce are too costly to bother with.
That rhetoric isn't Vermont Strong. It's Vermont Mean.
And it cheapens what by all other yardsticks is a profound victory.