KC's green sewer plan deserves federal stimulus funds

Green solutions do need ongoing maintenance, just like gray solutions do. Without ongoing maintenance, the plants will die, the soil will get plugged preventing inflitration, pervious pavement will become plugged with fine soil and other debris, and on and on.

I don't have numbers to compare the cost of maintaining green solutions to the cost of maintaining gray solutions, but there is an ongoing cost, which is one of my concerns about the private sector projects. When the property owner decides they no longer can afford or simply do not want the continued cost of maintaining the green solution, all of the benefit is lost, and I don't think there is any way the City can require the property owner to continue to maintain the green solution unless the City paid some portion of the construction cost and required the property owener to enter into an agreement to maintain it. Even then, that agreement would have to be attached to the property title to ensure that when the property is sold that maintenance will continue. By the way, there are also administrative costs that are ongoing as well to assure the maintenance is occuring.

Can you give us some specifics?

These green solutions require ongoing funding. The minute you stop maintaining the Green portion of the project the solution is lost. This sounds nice but the reality is that it is a perpetual cost for taxpayers for a questionable gain. Let's fix the sewers themselves and leave the green alone.

deserving as any other project -- but can we, the taxpayers, afford it? Where is the money going to come from to pay for this $1 trillion "stimulus" package?

Current GDP is what, $14 tril? Federal budget is about $3 tril? 3/14=.... Even adding in state, city, county, and cemetery districts, you got a long way to go to add up to 1/3 of the economy.

Also, make a list: transcontinental railroad, Civil War, opening of the West, rural electrification, public elementary education, land-grant colleges, WWI, WWII, space program, Interstate system, the New Deal, the Internet, usw. Which of these did NOT involve huge amounts of government spending, but DID result in either directly or supportively engendering massive national economic development? As far as I can see, only the Net. (And please let's not start quoting Mark Robertson's favorite author, who says the New Deal caused the Depression).

Ideology is nice, but history's better.
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Oh, yeah. The free market is lousy at providing funds for forward-looking development. The government's role in alternative energy, for instance, could be to offer prizes for 50-mpg passenger cars. OR, and I like this one, it could jack the price of gasoline via taxes to draw forth the energies of the market. In either case, the private sector can't afford to develop its good ideas for high mpg cars on spec. Either somebody has to give it all or some of the money up front, because investors want to see ROI now, or somebody has to ensure that the market will be there by the time the development process has come to fruition.

don't you know that the only thing "good" in our lives comes from government?

A very intelligently brief and articulately assembled lesson in the history of 2 of the 4 principal "schools" of economics of my considerable lifetime.

I was never a firm beliver in The chicago school....but I can state with absolute certainty that, at this point, I would be thrilled to have the government represent only one third of our GNP.

Nevertheless, the "Obama" future portends a placid balanced society but one that is reactionary in creative economic development....the historical engine of our economic train. I still believe that to be our greatest opportunity for economic growth and I passionately believe that the truth is undeniably that the government is incapable of playing the "genesis" role.

While I am appreciative for your concern, my cell bill is covered.

If you were UNDER 39, you'd shrug your shoulders, mutter, "What...EVER," and go back to worrying about how you were going to pay your cell phone bill this month.

Since you've indicated you're older than 39, you've got a choice to make. You can recognize that the simplistic, Chicago School model of the economy is even less explanatory than the Keynesian model it supplanted, at least in the minds of policymakers, and you can try to learn the new set of rules. Or you can spend the remainder of your mentally-active years gnashing your teeth (or making a pretense of gnashing your teeth) over the inexplicable refusal of the powers that be to return to the bright, primary-color world of Ronald Reagan.

Because we're not going back, chazzykc. Milt Friedman and Chicago School aren't dead and they're not dead wrong, but they've been relegated to an advisory role and will remain there. Play the clip over and over again: Alan Greenspan admitting that, he, like so many other truly skilled pros, honestly believed that either banks would self-regulate as part of a rational, undistorted market, or they would be forced by the market to do so, will they or nil they.

And that was Clinton's role in all this: he was the only President to fully understand what Greenspan was layin' down, and to go with it on a reasoned basis. Unfortunately, Friedman was wrong, Greenspan was wrong, and by extension Clinton was wrong: GOVERNMENT HAS AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN THE ECONOMY. Government will end up, as it has in every other modern economy, as approximately a third of the economy. Get used to it.

Yael,

I'm afraid that even if this city government managed to get the entire 2.4 billion from a federal stimulus package they would fritter the money away building golden stairs down to an open cess-pool.