It’s not just our bridges that are getting worse. Many of the more than 35,000 miles of road in Massachusetts are in declining condition (our most heavily used highways are in relatively good shape, but the secondary routes are another story). Our rail system operates at a huge deficit and is beset with service problems. Our state hospitals, jails, courthouses, and college campuses are in varying degrees of disrepair. As a state, we continually understaff and underfund the myriad agencies charged with keeping our infrastructure in safe working order, and we fail to perform the kind of routine maintenance—washing corrosive road salt off our bridges in the springtime, and keeping them painted to ward off rust—that can prevent expensive repairs in the future. Putting just $100,000 into bridge maintenance, says MassHighway Commissioner Luisa Paiewonsky, can save $9 million in fixes down the line. Yet over and over we neglect to make these simple investments.

Massachusetts Transportation Secretary Bernard Cohen says the state shortchanges bridge maintenance alone by $500 million a year. The Pioneer Institute, a public-policy think tank, recently released a report showing that in the century since the Longfellow Bridge opened to traffic, the span has undergone only two repair projects of any note, one in 1959 and the other in 2002. Steve Poftak, research director at the institute, estimates that investing one percent of the Longfellow’s value in routine maintenance each year would have cost about $120 million through the decades and would have kept the bridge in good condition. Instead, the bridge has fallen into decrepitude and will now cost $200 million to overhaul. And that’s merely one pending repair bill. The Transportation Finance Commission, convened by the state legislature in 2004 to investigate our crumbling infrastructure, released a report in March estimating that the maintenance requirements of just our existing roads and bridges will create a shortfall of as much as $19 billion over the next 20 years. The mess is so deep and so intractable there’s no politically effective way to downplay it. The Patrick administration doesn’t try. “We have inherited what I consider to be a dysfunctional series of agencies and underfunded assets that the people of Massachusetts have not been told the truth about,” Cohen said at a transportation conference in September organized by the Pioneer Institute.

By now, every politician, public interest group, and transportation policy expert in Massachusetts knows full well how significant the problems are. What no one seems to know, however, is whether we can actually do anything about them.

In the late ’80s, when Fred Salvucci was secretary of transportation in the Dukakis administration, a budget crunch created by the passage of Proposition 2½ made it necessary to lay off many MassHighway workers. By 1989, the agency was down to about 3,300 employees. “We didn’t have the staff to do what was being asked of us,” recalls Salvucci, who now lectures at MIT. In 2001, MassHighway’s workforce had shrunk to 2,100, a number the Federal Highway Administration determined to be “well below the minimum” for inspection and testing, partly because a “significant number” of those staff members “lack the necessary training and qualifications” for their critical jobs. Today, with the state’s aging infrastructure two decades older, Paiewonsky has half the number of workers Salvucci had.

It’s not just in its staffing, though, that the agency is underfunded. “If we had our preferences, we’d probably be putting 20 to 40 percent of our budget into maintenance,” Paiewonsky says. Instead, the agency goes begging for resources for a task as essential as plowing. Salvucci recalls appearing before the legislature nearly every year to argue for money to keep the roads clear in a state where it’s been known, occasionally, to snow. “Well, it’s July,” they’d tell him. “Maybe it will be a warm winter.” Twenty years later, nothing has changed. At the transportation conference, Cohen said he gets half to two-thirds of the funds everyone knows he’ll need for snow removal, requiring him to go back midwinter to ask for more.

Paiewonsky says MassHighway is evolving, that it is in the process of hiring 100 new engineers, including, for the first time, a chief engineer brought in from outside. “We’re changing the way we budget,” she says, “the way we design.” Still, she acknowledges the agency is not adequately financed. The poor condition of the state’s infrastructure, she says, “is in large part a reflection of what we put into it.”

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