This commentary is by Nicholas Boke of Cherster. He is a freelance writer and international education consultant.
I remember when the realization hit as I drove from Springfield to Chester on Route 11’s smooth new pavement in 2022.
Everyone who’d been driving that state highway often — and most highways and roads, in fact — had learned where to twist and where to turn when the frost heaves, widening cracks and vicious potholes seemed likely to cause real damage to a car’s underside.
But there I was that day, just driving along, safely staying between the newly painted lines, knowing my car would not be damaged.
I thought, “This is probably the last time this road will be repaved during my lifetime. Maybe even during my daughter’s lifetime.”
Remember how Americans have been kicking every infrastructure project down the road for years, for decades. Then Biden decided that referring to a forthcoming week as an “infrastructure week,” as Trump had often done, had made for good jokes but bad governing. So he got the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed and signed.
But even that wasn’t enough.
Whether it was roads or schools or municipal buildings or parks, America has been deferring maintenance for much too long. Vermont is no exception.
Why? It’s simple: We just didn’t want to pay to take care of things.
In Rutland, it’s the library where such deferral has finally caught up with itself. The Rutland Free Library, which was moved to its current location in the 1930s, is facing problems ranging from peeling paint to decaying masonry that would cost around $10 million to fix, so the recommendation is to move it to another building on Merchants’ Row at a cost of $4.5 million.
Then there’s Vermont’s women’s prison. Even with $3 million a year for deferred maintenance, it’s facing mold, ceilings that drip and a variety of problems that can’t be easily repaired. The cost of the new prison would be $70 million, with $15 million currently available.
More broadly, this year alone, VTDigger tells us that 29 of Vermont’s municipalities with at least 5,000 residents will ask voters to approve almost $275 million for capital projects — “a leap from $60 million last year” — in a collective wishlist heavy with plans for water and sewer plants.
Then there’s the state itself. Coming upon Vermont’s “Deferred Maintenance Projects,” I ran into 14 pages of projects: from a $50,000 State Office Building parking lot in Burlington, to $550,000 to repair the sidewalks, parking lot and control system at Middlebury’s Mahady Courthouse, to $400,000 for nine projects at Royalton’s Public Safety Office. And so on for a total of $10.5 million.
“Add to this Emerson Lynn’s Oct. 29 St. Albans Messenger opinion piece that stated:
Vermont would need to spend a minimum of $6.4 billion over the next two decades to catch up with the deferred maintenance of our schools, according to a report released earlier this year. That is not going to happen. We don’t have that kind of money.”
And on a local note, in 2022 Chester voters turned down a $20 million bond issue that would have fixed the town’s three schools that had been given Band-Aids for years as the town avoided truly fixing them in order to keep property taxes down.
Just as Chester is not alone in Vermont, Vermont is not alone in the U.S. According to Transportation Today’s Feb. 13 article:
“A new report from the non-profit Volcker Alliance warns that repairs to the nation’s aging infrastructure could cost more than $1 trillion, or 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, a figure that represents the United States’ deferred maintenance costs for its roads, highways and other critical public assets.”
So here we are. Voting — and in some cases having to vote again — on wastewater treatment plants, school roofs and public libraries, hoping that somehow the whole thing will hold together, hoping that prisoners won’t be rained on in their beds, school ventilation systems will function adequately, roads and public buildings will be safe.
All this, while the state of Vermont can no longer afford to support school building renovations, and the federal government — which hadn’t kept up with things anyway — is in the process of undoing the little that remains of its help for states. Add to that the likelihood that FEMA is about to be basically scrapped while climate change is about to dramatically increase the need for help throughout the country.
Whew! What’s next? How bad can it get? What will it feel like to live in this country, or even in this what-had-seemed-safe little state, when worse actually turns into the worst?
