Mugan: Privatizing bridge design is just asking for trouble

http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/205191

Mugan: Privatizing bridge design is just asking for trouble

Tom Mugan, guest columnist — 8/11/2007 10:19 am

In the wake of the Twin Cities bridge tragedy, we are all paying renewed attention to our national infrastructure and the dangers of deferred maintenance. The state of Wisconsin engineers responsible for designing our bridges have a special perspective that's up close and personal.

We're engineers, but we're also taxpayers and citizens. We care about our work, and we feel a strong responsibility to provide for the public's safety. Our perspective is that the Minnesota tragedy re-emphasizes the need to have a suitably sized staff of qualified and well-trained public employees to serve the public interest -- not just to ensure our bridges are safe, but to promote public safety across the board.

The good news is that most national measures indicate that Wisconsin's bridges are relatively well-built and maintained. The bad news is that this may change if public policy continues to be twisted toward private outsourcing, as it has been for many years.

The State Engineering Association represents 1,100 state employees in professional engineering occupations. Among our members are exactly seven engineers and six computer-aided design specialists devoted to designing public bridges.

According to a survey conducted in 2005 by the Missouri Department of Transportation, for each Wisconsin design engineer there were 979 public bridges in Wisconsin. That was by far one of the highest ratios among the 33 states surveyed. Other states had ratios as low as one design engineer per 50 bridges. Only Puerto Rico and Hawaii had fewer design engineers than Wisconsin.

The study showed that 75 percent of the design and engineering work on public bridges in Wisconsin is done not by public servants but by private firms, which may not be around after the contract is completed and if problems develop. Only seven other states in the 2005 survey had equal or greater dependence on private contractors. On average, states relied on public engineering staff to do about half of all bridge design work.

FULL article at link.

Please make no mistake ....the oligarchs are clustering, planning and conspiring as we speak to take over the assets of the USA for penneys on the dollar so that local and state governments don't have to raise taxes to improve our infrastructure. They will tell us that it will be better and that our roads and bridges will be well taken care of.

Check out "Russian Oligarchs" to see how it was done. First is to create a financial crisis, then capitalize on said crisis.

The American oligarchs are going to be the same Wall St private equity firms that have cannibalized our country.