Showing posts with label Infrastructure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Infrastructure. Show all posts

Monday, January 22, 2018

Leaked document shows White House plan for major rural infrastructure program

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Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Oroville Dam’s repair estimates jump to $275 million



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Tuesday, April 4, 2017

"Together we are going to rebuild our nation," Pres Trump tells Building Trades Unions.









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Friday, March 3, 2017

LA Times to Democrats: Stop “resisting” Trump long enough to get our infrastructure pork, please

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Sunday, February 19, 2017

California's ailing infrastructure on display after rain causes roads to crumble...

















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Thursday, June 16, 2016

Budget offers hundreds of millions in spending increases on welfare but nothing for infrastructure.

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Monday, April 18, 2016

"Constant cost overruns and a lack of accountability plague California’s infrastructure projects. Politicians casually throw 'millions' and 'billions' around like a game of monopoly, leaving hard-working families and future generations to pay the debt they so flippantly create."

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Monday, August 3, 2015

Even though California has some of the nation's highest taxes, the politicians are trying to use the state's bad roads as an excuse to repeal part of Prop. 13. But the fact is the politicians themselves are to blame for the bad roads, not Prop. 13.

◼ Don’t Reward Bad Behavior - Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association

...To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, here we go again. Once more, taxpayers are being told by our political elites that, if we want good roads, we have to have higher taxes.

Just a few weeks ago, this column exposed the politicians’ plan to hike gas taxes along with vehicle license fees and registration. This plan, by San Jose lawmaker Jim Beall would slam taxpayers in three ways. First, it would raise at least $3 billion annually by increasing the gas tax by another 10 cents a gallon. Second, it would hike the vehicle license fee, which is based on value, by more than 50 percent over 5 years. Third, it would increase the cost to register a vehicle by over 80 percent.

The latest scheme is Assembly Constitutional Amendment 4 which would weaken Proposition 13 by eliminating the two-thirds vote for local transportation sales taxes. ACA 4 is a bad idea. California already has the highest state sales tax in the nation. Not only that, but sales taxes are highly regressive, hitting the poor and working middle class the hardest.

It is true that California ranks very low nationally in the condition of its roads and highways. But, in addition to an already high sales tax we also have the highest income tax rate in America and the 4th highest gas tax. (And, by the way, that gas tax doesn’t even include the cost of California’s one of a kind “cap and trade” regulations which substantially increases the cost of every gallon of fuel pumped in California).

The truth is that the sad condition of our highways has nothing to do with the lack of tax dollars and has everything to do with poor management and bad choices in deciding where our transportation dollars are spent. Our taxes are far more likely to be paying for projects we don’t even need — like High Speed Rail — or a bloated Caltrans budget than they are for fixing roads....
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Wednesday, June 17, 2015

"Now will voters get it?"



Every month another story emerges from California that makes out-of-staters think, “Now will those Democrat voters get it?” Then the state sends another batch of leftists to Sacramento to pass more job-killing, life-denying restrictions on their everyday activities. But the current crisis isn’t merely bad economic theory or social justice activism; a state filled with rivers, lakes and bordering an ocean is running out of water.

I ask again: Now will they get it?
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Monday, June 1, 2015

There's an effort in the Legislature right now to raise gas taxes - despite that California already has some of the nation's highest gas taxes.

◼ More Pain at the Pump - Jon Coupal/Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association

Sacramento is about to launch a new attack in its ongoing war on drivers.

California’s 48.6 cent gas tax already ranks second out of 50 states –- the feds take another 18.4 cents — and when the hidden carbon tax, part of the cap-and-trade program, is factored in, our state leads the pack by a wide margin. But this is not nearly enough, according to the political class.

Sen. Jim Beall is building a coalition of both Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature to hike gas taxes along with vehicle license fees and registration.

The San Jose lawmaker’s Senate Bill 16 slams taxpayers in three ways. First, it would raise at least $3 billion annually by increasing the gas tax by another 10 cents a gallon. Second, it would hike the vehicle license fee, which is based on value, by more than 50 percent over 5 years. Third, it would increase the cost to register a vehicle by over 80 percent.

Although the backers of the SB 16 tax increase say it is vital to make up the claimed $59 billion backlog in roadway maintenance, some of the funds are slated to go to repaying transportation bonds that, when passed, were to be paid from the general fund. This means that not all of the new revenue will go to the stated intent of fixing roads and highways.

Whatever the actual dollar amount of the backlog in roadway maintenance, this shortfall is the result of previous diversions of gas tax and truck weight revenue to budget items that have no direct impact on road improvement, and Beall’s bill would allow this practice to continue.

...Gas prices in California are already tops in the nation. If taxes are increased again, every motorist should be given a railroad engineer’s cap compliments of Sacramento lawmakers and the governor because the extra they pay will free up money, which could have been used for roads, to be spent on their pet train. KEEP READING
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Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Santa Barbara is set to reboot its desalination plant, as other cities look at building their own facilities.

◼ A mothballed desalination plant sits like a time capsule near Santa Barbara's main tourist beach, a relic of California's last drought to end all droughts. - Mercury News

With its control room filled with dot-matrix printers, floppy disks and obsolete computers, the padlocked Charles E. Meyer Desalination Facility represents this quintessential California coastal city's once-fleeting hope of quenching its thirst by tapping the ocean.

Now, 23 years after it closed, with the state entering the fourth year of its worst drought on record, Santa Barbara is preparing to reopen the plant, rekindling a debate that is spreading to communities up and down the coast: Is the state's water shortage now so dire that Californians should embrace desalination -- with its high economic costs and environmental risks -- as a critical element of a pricier water future?

...The plant cost $34 million to build during California's last major drought in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But shortly after it opened in 1992, drenching rains returned. And because the water was so expensive to produce, the city shut down the plant three months later and sold its filters to Saudi Arabia. It has sat, closed, ever since.

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Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Carly Fiorina blames "liberal environmentalists" for California drought:



◼ Is the Drought Making Us Dumb? - Joe Mathews/Fox&Hounds

Untrammeled growth? Unbridled growth? Endless growth?

Good grief.

I’m a child of the first Brown administration—back in the ‘70s, which was already an era of limits. The California I’ve known for four decades is one of unmet infrastructure needs, limits on growth, limits on taxes and limits on spending. In Los Angeles, we have fewer payroll jobs than we did 25 years ago.

The only unbridled things this California sees are broad, overwrought claims about California somehow being “unnatural.” If only snow in the Sierras was as common as such claims.

The drought is a big deal. So is climate change. We are going to have to change how we live. We are already making some changes. But let’s not pretend this is the fault of some supposedly “endless growth.” One of the problems we face has been a lack of growth, of underinvestment in water infrastructure.

It’s a real question whether Californians are prepared to spend and invest in such infrastructure. And that question is not because of growth; it’s because Californians have been so skeptical of growth, and so determined to limit it.
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California’s ‘man-made’ environmental disaster



The present crisis is not an entirely California-based; Washington also plays a role. In December, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would have pumped water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into Central and Southern California, but it died an unceremonious death in the Democrat-dominated Senate. If the measure had passed both chambers of Congress, President Barack Obama pledged to veto it. Why? Environmental groups feared the threat it posed to the smelt.

“That’s the tragedy of California, because of liberal environmentalists’ insistence — despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled,” said former CEO and U.S. Senate candidate from the Golden State Carly Fiorina. “There is a man-made lack of water in California — and Washington manages the water for the farmers.”

“President Obama goes out to California a little over a year ago, calls it a tragedy of global warming and hands out money to a food bank,” she continued. “This is all about politics and policy, and it is liberal environmentalists who have brought us this tragedy.”
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Monday, February 9, 2015

The State Senate's top Democrat now wants to impose a new $1.8 billion "fee" on drivers. She says they need more money for roads, but how is it that California has the highest gas tax in the nation and can't keep roads in decent condition?

◼ Knee Jerk Tax Hikes - Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association

For the second time in as many weeks Californians got the news that Sacramento politicians are proposing yet another big tax hike. The truth is that new taxes would never be required were it not for Sacramento’s mismanagement of existing tax dollars.

Last week, it was the proposal to deal with the very real problem of “revenue volatility” in California’s tax structure with the very unreal “solution” of a $10 billion tax on services.

But the latest proposal comes from new Senate leader Toni Atkins who proposes a brand new tax on drivers to pay for highway and road repairs in California. This new “fee” would take $1.8 billion dollars out of the pockets of hard working California citizens over the next five years.

Now, most Californians would wholeheartedly agree that our roads are in terrible shape. Years of neglect have resulted in a highway system that, according to a recent state report, requires a massive infusion of $59 billion. But taxpayers have a very good question that has yet to be answered: How is it that California has the highest gas tax in the nation and yet cannot keep its roads in decent condition? KEEP READING
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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

California’s Christmas gift — new tax on gasoline

◼ This time of year most people are buying presents and celebrating with their families, but bureaucrats at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) are preparing a new gas tax that could raise prices up to 76 cents a gallon on January 1st. - Lodi News Sentinel

Our California legislature has a holiday greeting for you. Beginning in January, you will be paying a minimum of $1 to $2 more per tank full of gas.
Apparently having the second-highest gasoline tax in the nation is not good enough for the majority of folks we put into political office. And it may not stop there. Some experts say these new fees could eventually tack on as much as an additional 76 cents per gallon!
Of course, it’s all going for a good cause. It will be used to fix California’s decaying infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, right? Dream on.

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Monday, October 20, 2014

The $1 billion Carlsbad Desalination Project, which will convert as much as 56 million gallons of seawater each day into drinking water for San Diego County residents, is emerging from the sand like an industrial miracle.

◼ Could desalination solve California’s water problem? - Sacramento Bee

...Along this patch of the Pacific Ocean, welders and pipefitters nearly outnumber the surfers and sunbathers. Within sight of the crashing waves, the laborers are assembling what some hope will make water scarcity a thing of the past.

They are building the Carlsbad Desalination Project, which will convert as much as 56 million gallons of seawater each day into drinking water for San Diego County residents. The project, with a price tag of $1 billion, is emerging from the sand like an industrial miracle. In California’s highly regulated coastal zone, it took nearly 15 years to move from concept to construction, surviving 14 legal challenges along the way....

Reverse-osmosis desalination was invented in California in the 1950s. But other nations with fewer natural freshwater supplies – Israel, Australia, Saudi Arabia and others – embraced the technology first and built dozens of projects over the past few decades. When the Carlsbad plant begins operating in 2016, it will be the largest desalination project ever built in the Americas. Desalination on this scale is so new, said MacLaggan, that Carlsbad will be operated initially by an Israeli subcontractor, which will help train a staff of California workers.

The eyes of a thirsty state are trained on this project: It is a crucial test for an industry eager to expand in California, where residents are famously protective of their coastline and also accustomed to relatively cheap water. In short, the Carlsbad project is challenging California’s status quo while also offering the tantalizing prospect of relief from drought.

“This plant can’t come online fast enough,” said Bob Yamada, water resources manager at the San Diego County Water Authority, which serves 3.1 million people and is buying all of the plant’s freshwater production. “It’s droughtproof. That’s one of the most important attributes. It will be the most reliable water source we have.”

...The state has more than a dozen permitted desalination plants, but they are all small. When Carlsbad begins operating, it will produce about 25 times more drinking water than all of them combined...
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Tuesday, March 11, 2014

“As a matter of fact, he [Obama] said at that meeting, he said, ‘If I hear any of you pushing back, making statements about Washington spends too much money, you’ll hear from me,” he said, adding, “I’m highly offended by that.”

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◼ Rick Perry shaken up by Obama’s disturbing threat to governors in meeting - Right Wing News

“When you have governors, and we all compete against each other — we are the laboratories of innovation — and for the President of the United States to look Democrat and Republican governors in the eye and say, ‘I do not trust you to make decisions in your state about issues of education, about transportation infrastructure,’ — and that is really troubling,” he said.
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Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Tim Donnelly LEGISLATIVE UPDATE:

◼ My bill to defund Gov. Brown’s “bullet train” was immediately killed by the Assembly Transportation Committee on a party line vote.

AB 842 would have prohibited federal and state funds from being used to finance the high-speed rail project on the basis that California’s crumbling infrastructure should be funded first.

My response: “When our roads are in disrepair, it saddens me to see that my colleagues in the Assembly were more compelled to support this High Speed Boondoggle once again, instead of having the chance to rebuild our current highways to the standards they were once famous for.”
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