Guest editorial sparks questions, concerns for reader

MOSES LAKE - In a recent guest editorial, Dani Bolyard, Chairperson of the Grant County Republican Party, commenting on the Port's request that the legislature transfer money previously designated to one part of the railroad project to another part of the project with a better chance of being completed, wrote that it was too bad that funding for this infrastructure project couldn't have been found locally, "the project would most likely have been completed by now."

At the end of her well-written piece, she writes, "Infrastructure is vital to our free-market system." She must have been disappointed, then, as I was, when the recent keep-the-lights-on federal budget compromise included deep cuts in vital infrastructure elements: highway repair and high-speed railroad projects, both essential for improving American productivity as well as being likely sources of sorely needed employment for thousands of currently unemployed workers; workers who would soon be paying taxes into, and no longer drawing unemployment checks out of the federal largesse, positives with respect to the fiscal quagmire we're having a hard time getting out of.

Too, it isn't just that infrastructure is vital to our economy, as Ms. Bolyard points out, it signifies the care with which we bequeath this country to our grandchildren. For example, most of us living in Grant County, and its surrounds, benefit daily from Grand Coulee Dam, grateful that an unselfish, prior generation built, and gave it to us, abiding by the tradition set down by our founders of passing on better than they got. A tradition, I might add, in jeopardy of not being kept by those of us facing today the despair of an economic gloom steering us backward, and provoking the lament: We need to cut spending so that we won't pass a huge federal debt on to our grandchildren.

News reports inform us that bridges have collapsed, dams have burst, gas mains have exploded, pipelines have ruptured, all of which have taken human life including some of our grandchildren. Schools have literally fallen down, power grids have deteriorated, and airports, railroads, and highways in disrepair or needing expansion, go wanting.

Aged water mains leak billions of gallons of drinking water each day, and ancient sewer systems threaten to contaminate what's left.

Would we rather leave our grandchildren unable to achieve the American dream, surrounded by an American nightmare of crumbling, rusting, rotting, and inefficient infrastructure; or would we rather enable them by repairing it where it's broken, and adding to it where it's deficient in meeting the demands of our ever burgeoning population?

We have a choice, it seems to me; do it now at today's costs, passing the debt on to them; or kick tradition in the face, insist that 20-30 years from now, they upgrade their own world, incurring inflation-bloated costs for greater than any debt our sense of responsibility would have handed them.

Do we somehow acquire the mindset that gave us Grand Coulee Dam and selflessly rebuilt Europe after World War II, or do we sit quiescent, letting our grandchildren's inheritance decay in front of their eyes; including local projects left starving for funding?