On 15Oct2020 1525, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
> It's like my dad working in a prison teaching small engine repair.  > Prison rules meant workshops had ONE set of tools and they had to be
 > accounted for after each day. Sometimes they break. Dad went into >
stores, found 8 or 10 sets of everything. He asked about that - > turned
out if you didn't spend all your budget, it was assumed you > didn't
need the extra in coming years so they cut it (so when you > need it,
you could well not get it!). So they always bought new stuff > even
beyond needs just to keep their budget allocation. > Insanity.
That's completely normal. I grew up in a rural area, on an unsealed road
running off a more major (sealed) one. Every couple of years the first
few hundred yards of our road would get resealed - far more often than
it needed, while the rest would stay unsealed and full of potholes. The
same went for all the side-roads in the county.

The re-sealing always happened just before the new year's budget, and
was the county using up any roading budget surplus. And why a few
hundred yards on each side-road? Because that was how far you could see
down the roads from the main road, so they could point to these nice
'sealed' side-roads should anyone come wanting to see how well the money
was spent.

When the national government forced the amalgamation of the rural
counties into fewer much bigger ones ours was merged with the nearby
city, an unpopular move with the county's inhabitants. The county blew
all its cash that last year on sealing the side-roads. First time they
ever did anything useful for their rate payers. Still, better than the
city, which charges rates but unless you're in the city proper about all
you get for them is use of its library - in all the ~35 years since the
county was joined to it, that side-road (where my parent still live) has
never been resealed, not even those first few hundred yards. More people
live on it, there's more traffic, and rates are higher, no councillor
lives there, so it doesn't matter, see?

When your infrastructure spending is worse than that of a small, mostly
broke, rural county, and you're a big and expanding city, that's
insanity. Yet not spending on infrastructure seems to be a thing in this
past half-century.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>