Veep goes off on roads
Vice President Joe Biden calls for more spending on infrastructure
EAST PROVIDENCE – “What in the hell are we doing?” “What in God’s name are we doing?”
This is the message Vice President Joe Biden offers about the state of the country’s infrastructure, particularly in Rhode Island, which has been ranked 50 out of 50 states for the quality of its bridges.
Biden visited the East Providence Department of Transportation Maintenance Facility to tout RhodeWorks, the road improvement plan from Governor Gina Raimondo and the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT).
The vice president didn’t need to go far from the facility to observe the state’s infrastructure woes. Prior to
addressing a small group of public officials and reporters, he toured the Warren Avenue underpass not 500 feet from the entrance to the facility.
“For 10 years, you’ve had Lincoln Logs holding that damn thing up?” he commented, calling it “shameful.”
While he is legally not allowed to say any state or money should get more money, Biden told the audience he “can guarantee you’ll be looked at very closely.”
The investment needed just to maintain infrastructure nationwide would be $3.6 trillion by 2020, Biden said.
Between 1946 and 1973, when the United States saw the biggest growth in the middle class in its history, Biden said, the country invested 4 percent of its GDP in infrastructure. Now that figure is less than 1 percent.
Commenting on the damage trucks do to roads, Biden teasingly blamed the Secret Service for ripping up his driveway with their 10,000pound cars.
Offering some optimism, he said that “insourcing is what’s happening in America today. Folks are coming home. Businesses are coming to the United States that weren’t here before.”
He cited the country’s productive workforce, legal system that doesn’t steal intellectual property and great research universities as some of the reasons why.
Many companies want to be here, he said, but are saying they can’t if there is no rail system and if the bridges are bad. About 22 percent of the state’s 1,162 bridges are structurally deficient.
After mentioning $178 million in transportation funds Rhode Island received from the Recovery Act, Biden said: “Now it’s time to finish the job, and put us back in a position where Rhode Island is a genuinely prosperous state, generating good middle-class jobs.”
Speaking to the crowd before Biden’s remarks, Raimondo told of a recent encounter walking by a laborer fixing a bridge. He yelled from about a block away, “Hey Gov, thanks for the work!” she recalled.
Biden was introduced by Dee Pandolfi, a RIDOT plow truck driver Raimondo met last winter. All four members of Rhode Island’s congressional delegation – which Biden called one of the best in the entire United States Congress – also spoke.
“The measure of the success of our nation is not that those with the much get more,” Sen. Jack Reed said, “it’s everybody gets a chance, and there’s no better way to do that than to invest in infrastructure, in jobs, in productivity.”
Congressman Jim Langevin said the condition of Rhode Island bridges is “downright scary” and pointed to the 6/10 connector, where seven of the 10 bridges are rated as structurally deficient.
“We don’t want our commuters to be afraid of disaster like we saw in Minneapolis just a few years ago,” he said. Langevin was referring to a bridge collapse on Interstate 35W in 2007 that killed 13.
Congressman David Cicilline pointed out that the United States ranks 16th in the quality of infrastructure.
“Closing our infrastructure gap is a big undertaking, but don’t let anybody tell you we can’t do this,” he said. “This is the United States of America.”
Other attendees at the event included Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien, Central Falls Mayor James Diossa and Cumberland Mayor Bill Murray, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.
Murray commented that he thinks the governor is on the right track and he hopes RhodeWorks can be expanded.
“If we don’t do it,” he said, “in my case, my grandchildren and family are going to suffer greatly.”