WASHINGTON — Compared with the epic approach of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, President Obama's economic recovery strategy could be summed up as: Think small -- in a huge way.
FDR left a legacy of engineering marvels that still adorn the landscape: the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, and New York's LaGuardia Airport and Triborough Bridge among them.
But don't look for similar monuments to emerge from the new stimulus plan, despite its $787-billion price tag. Billions in infrastructure spending is likely to go for less-glamorous but widely distributed projects such as repaving battered streets, repairing rundown schools and replacing aging sewer lines.
"Resurfacing, painting, lighting and maintenance programs are not as flashy as building a new bridge, but as projects they are no less important," said Jeff Solsby of the American Road and Transportation Builders Assn. "They provide important benefits and create jobs to grow the economy."
So forget about stimulus money going to build Los Angeles' "Subway to the Sea," a massive project aimed at easing the city's legendary traffic problems, or for a long-sought light-rail extension to Los Angeles International Airport.
"The 'shovel ready' requirement in the stimulus bill recently approved by Congress makes it difficult to include grand public works projects," said Burbank City Manager Michael Flad.
The tight timeline for infrastructure spending makes such things all but impossible. Half of the money for highways and bridges must be obligated within 120 days, the other half within a year.
The intent is to put people to work and pump money into the economy quickly.
"So we concentrated on projects that were ready to go . . . projects that were just waiting for the money so they could be built," said Jim Berard, spokesman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. "Most of those are not sexy things, but are badly needed nonetheless."
Still, Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based free-market think tank, said: "Obama's early statements on the stimulus, comparing its impact to that of [President] Eisenhower's interstate highway program, created a false expectation that it would be comparable to the New Deal in building great new public works. The sad reality is that the bill Congress wrote and Obama signed is mostly make-work stuff."
