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Below is a link to the economic stimulus/recovery "wish list" as proposed by the council of mayors. Today was the first time I've seen the complete list. It includes quiet of number of Charleston projects. I don't remember seeing more than a couple of projects
listed in the Post & Courier. I thought these were supposed to be "shovel ready" projects that could immediately get the ecomomy jump-started. Looking at the Charleston projects, very few would be and some are even identified as funding for project studies.
Love your town and visit often. I read through the wish list of potential Charleston projects that could use some of the stimulus $$$. There are probably some overlaps with what's already on the mayor's list. Glad to see some attention to Amtrak, light rail from Summerville. Efficient public transportation and infrastructure leads to private job creation.
Here are my two cents:
1. Park and ride lots in village-like settings with leasing of land for commuter-friendly commercial services--coffee shops, satellite commuter grocery stores, dry cleaners, UPS or Post Office, day care center, etc. on upper peninsula. Purchase rush-hour buses to go downtown and come back up. And while you're at it, water taxis from some of your shoreline communities to commuter marinas on the peninsula.
2. Extend to downtown the nearly completed bike path that now runs from Ravenal Bridge, down East Bay, to Church Street. Keep a goin' to the Battery!
3. Create another bike path on the the west side running from Wagener Terrace, through Hampton Park to downtown or at least to MUSC. You folks have a three-season biking potential, a ton of college students, and, sorry, lots of folks who look as if they could burn more calories and less gas (y driving two instead of four wheels. (I know. Hard to resist all that good Southern cooking.)
4. Purchase or condemnation of falling-down foreclosed hovels in developing neighborhoods and replace them with well-designed, well-lit vest pocket parks and community gardens to be run by volunteer neighborhood associations. It kills me to walk through some upper Charleston neighborhoods with well-kept homes interspersed with decrepit, abandoned homes that are beyond rehabilitation.
5. Flood control for West side of upper Charleston. This would create a ton of jobs and attract more homebuyers to keep the area moving.
6. Looking for shovel ready? Every street in struggling neighborhoods on your upper East and West sides should have attractive smooth sidewalks, plantings, well-paved streets, and beautiful lighting in keeping with the architecture up there. A no brainer. I see your honking port on one side and MUSC on the other, street after street of potentially beautiful houses to be rehabbed, but not if the streets are flooded, full of potholes, sidewalks a mess, sparse lighting. Make the public commitment and the private development will follow.
7. Rehaul of bus transportation system so that is inviting, predictable, and efficient. I couldn't figure out how to use the buses and I'm a public transportation nut!
We're going on a trillion dollars to the zillionaire bankers. On the next trillion, beautiful Charleston should get some infrastructure projects off the ground that will enhance its incomparable beauty and potential.
What the ____? I believe we need a stimulus but what in the world was that list of pork and pipe dreams. Shouldn't fire stations and smaller scale repairs to seawalls and streets be in the operating budget since they are pretty much par for the course costs. And what business is going to be improved by turning the Morrsion/King & Meeting street interections into King Street North.
We need to attract businesses or add programs at Tech or the local colleges that would draw people here for qualified employees. Adding firestations, streetscapes and community ammenities is not a stimulus.
I think trying to get money for a rail service between Summerville, N Chuck and Charleston is valid since it would offer an improve quality of life in all three places and it would help the Convention Center/Collesium be more competitive with other areas where downtowns and tourist attractions are easily accessed from the convention areas. It would also create jobs for the poeple who maintained and manned the service. And draining 17 would be fine as a general public safety issue but its not holding anyone back financially.
The problem with draining half the residential areas of charleston is that it would almost require pumping since parts are pretty low compared to water levels at high tide. I also don't think that is going to stimulate anything other than property values of a dozen houses at a time. The upper west side is actually doing well on its own if you mean the Wagner Terrace, Sans Succi area.
Randomly spending money on issues that have existed for twenty years is not a stimulus. Half the money from those projects would probably go from an out of town desinger to an out of town contract to its workers who are probably driving in from beyong Jedburg. I don't understand where many of these items will have any type of prolonged (or even local) impacts on the economy. And I'm a Democrat- I can only imagine what some of my conservative friends would say. Maybe that's why the split the costs into so many categories instead of listing the in total by city.
Did anyone find any $ for an MUSC burn unit in there? I think that would be better than some of the infrsastructure since it would at least have add some longer term jobs for highly skilled medical.
Here is a stimulus Idea for you, how about we take that 350 Billion and give it back to the people, make it so that we don't have to pay federal income taxes for about five months....
The beautiful (probably only) thing about recreating a 30's style depression is we now have a living laboratory for seeing whos ideas work and who's are BS. For example, we now know that as an economist, Milton Friedman would have made a really good delivery driver.
We also have proved the ideas of Batra, Peterson (and lots of other people the financial rags don't cover) are correct: Depressions are caused by too much money in too few hands.
We duplicated the same ratio of wealth which we had among the social classes in 1929 in.....2008. So, it seems the one thing that most everyone agrees upon is that Keynesian-style spending is our only salvation.
With that in mind, may I suggest for SC infrastructure:
* Green technology. The south leads the nation in greenhouse gas emissions per capita. Solar power is a good start.
* Pollution remediation: SC leads the nation in the pounds of known carcinogens it dumps into its waters each year, and has one of the (if not the lowest) life expectancy rates of the 50 states. Public Health has a tie-in there fer sure.
*How about schools? SC's are the worst in the nation. When you say a "wireless classroom" in SC, you truly mean a "wireless" (as in no electricity) class (I'm joking here, but I'll bet somewhere in Williamsburg or Lee county...). ANY improvements to public ed would help the average person.
The way I see it, the main difference in the New Deal that saved this Country from the Great Depression and a "New New Deal" is this...
In the 1930's we had a massive workforce ready and WILLING to do whatever kind of work that was available to produce income for their families. This meant many thousands could be put to work in labor intensive programs around the Country, from digging ditches and moving rocks to improve byways and prepare to pave the many dirt roads throughout the land, to relocating graves by hand in preparations for building lakes such as we have in the area. This was geared toward employing the largely unskilled workforce and everyone was happy to do badbreaking work just to be back to work.
Nowadays, a major project such as rebuilding all the defective bridges and repaving large stretches of the interstate system; while worthwhile ventures, are not going to provide employment for the masses, but rather will reinvigorate specific areas of the economy. It's a different world. Dam building and road construction no longer require thousands of laborers. I am skeptical of the new employment numbers touted by this study. After all, it was compiled by City governments with an eye toward getting a piece of the Federal windfall.
For those differences, I am cautious to endorse increasing our debt to stimulate niche markets.
Just my opinion, as usual.
No a war saved us the last time, still the goverment but a little different than the new deal. Printing more money will push us into hipper inflation, the dollar you have now will only be worth fifty cents then. Not the way to stimulate the economy.
Consensus by Historians is that the Depression can be divided into three phases:
1. 1929-32, when we went bust by free-market capitalism, and tried to use the same flawed system to get out.
1932-37 when we had the NRA- American Socialism- and things got appreciably better.
1937-1941, When the USSC ruled most of the NRA unconstitutional, Roosevelt worried more about deficits so government spending dried up, and we started going under again- though not as bad as in the pre-32 period.
Point is, there would have been no USA- and no democracy- to save had it not been for the New Deal- which also was the blueprint for American economics from 1946-1973.
FYI, I truly don't think anything will work long-term to end our slide until we cut-off competition with 16-cent per hour labor via tariffs- like we had 1790-1973.
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Here's How I Would Spend Stimulus in Charleston
