This year, at least three mid-Michigan counties have considered converting paved roads to gravel as a budget fix.
...
"That's just part of a strategy we all are starting to face," said Michael Nobach, managing director of the Clinton County Road Commission.
Meanwhile, state legislators returned to the capitol building in Lansing to discuss further budget fixes.
Update from Moira: Well, damn. David is always at me to put up some posts, and then he goes off and steals my post ideas. I was going to steal this link from Charles Hill to inaugurate an ongoing series re "The Thirdworldization of America"*. (Send me links!)
The theme first occurred to me when I came across a 2007 article about infrastructure theft:
Theft of scrap metal, mostly copper, has vexed many areas of...life and industry for the last 18 months, fueled largely by record-level prices for copper resulting from a building boom in Asia. Common in developing counties, metal theft is now committed in nearly every state, largely by methamphetamine users who hock the metal to buy drugs, the authorities say.Thieves have stripped the wires out of phone lines, pulled plaques off cemetery plots, raided air-conditioning systems in schools and yanked catalytic converters from cars, all to be resold to scrap metal recyclers.
But perhaps no group has been as been as consistently singled out as ...farmers, who provide roughly half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. Irrigation systems, a treasure trove of copper, tend to be in remote places, out of the eyes of farmers and, until recently, law enforcement.
“This is the No. 1 crime affecting farmers and ranchers right now,” said Bill Yoshimoto, an assistant district attorney....
“Virtually every farmer...has been hit,” Mr. Yoshimoto said. “But some have been hit far beyond the value of the metal. For the farmer to replace the pump is anywhere between $3,000 to $10,000, and then there is downtime, and loss to crops.”
And I thought, what is some guy named Yoshimoto doing working as an assistant DA in the Congo?
OK, I kid. I replaced all the references to California with ellipses.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I don't remember Third World infrastructure raping being a large problem in this country. And I know there's an army of Pollyannas out there who'll want to tell me but it's alway been like this and throw out some crime stat from the '50s about thieving juvies. Please restrain yourselves, unless you're a Californian who's been farming for 50 years and can attest that indeed it has ever been thus.
Like David, I am profoundly disturbed that previously paved roads in this country will be designated with the "unimproved" marker in the next map edition. That is, if a quotidian expectation of having easy access to up-to-date map information isn't the next First World amenity to go...
*Or, as I suspect my near and dear are starting to think, "The Dale Gribble-ization of Moira".
Anyway, via Mr. Sullivan, here's a little only-in-Florida story that gave this ex-Floridian a moment of nostalgia this morning.
