Unfunded cost from Sprawl

I have a nack for connecting topics that to what some might seem unrelated. On Oct 29 this diagram ran in the local paper warning of the unfunded roads that need to be built to accommodate traffic by 2025. $1.6 Billion is a large bite to chew for a city that annually spends only $12 million a year on road building. Developers pay no impact fees to offset the skyrocketing cost to all city tax payers to foot the bill to build these roads. The development community always complains that it would cut into their profit margins or would be passed on to the purchasers of newly built properties. Well, I would think the cost of paving a street to your front door should be paid for those who will most directly benefit from that street. That would be the person that owns that front door. Not by all city tax payers. I paid for my street in front of my house already, you can pay for yours also.

I read an article titled Bangalore: Tech Eden No More in the Nov issue of Business Week the same week as the Oct 29 OWH article. The article in BW tells the reader that "Choked roads, poor sanitation, pollution, and an iffy water supply" threaten the prosperity of the Silicon Valley of India. It seems that the city fathers in Bangalore refused to head the warning signs as do my city fathers. Omaha's District 3 city councilmen was quoted as saying "we have no development problems in Omaha!" Well the Oct. 29 Omaha World Herald report seems to point to the exact opposite conclusion. If developers don't start paying now for the cost of city infrastructure, that their new construction creates, west Omaha will become a sea of single lane arterials that choke off commerce and economic development.

What is not mentioned in the article is that by 2025 all of the buildable land that Omaha can annex will be built on. If the roads are not built and paid for now they will become a $1.6 Billion tax burden on the entire city of Omaha's tax payers.

We should all wake up and smell the coffee before our pocket books are much lighter.