Damned Lies

America is a nation of builders. We built the Empire State Building in just one year. Isn’t it a disgrace that it can now take ten years just to get a minor permit approved for the building of a simple road?
-- US President Donald J. Trump, State of the Union speech, 1/30/2018

America is a nation of builders.

We built the Empire State Building in just one year.

Isn’t it a disgrace that it can now take ten years – ten years! – just to get a minor permit for a simple road?

If I had to pick one line from Trump’s State of the Union speech, one line that summarizes today everything wrong with America, that would be the line. That one right there: America is a nation of builders. We built the Empire State Building in just one year. Isn’t it a disgrace that it can now take ten years just to get a minor permit approved for the building of a simple road?

Begin at the beginning: America is a nation of builders.

What does that mean?

No. I’m serious. What does that mean?

“Builders” implies building things. What things? Houses? Skyscrapers? Bridges? Roads? That’s the context, isn’t it? That’s what Trump was talking about. Infrastructure. It sounds good, but what does it mean? All nations build those things. What identifies us as a “nation of builders” different from other nations who build things?

And I strongly suspect that those nations, such as Iraq, who have been on the receiving end of our artillery and missiles for the last decade and a half would argue this boast. For them, we are destroyers not builders. But I digress.

What does he mean, a nation of builders?

This is not a rhetorical question. Trump routinely makes statements of fact, that upon examination are anything but. This was supposed to be a Constitutionally mandated report on the state of the union, a summary of fact. So, who’s doing the building? When he says, “a nation of builders,” what exactly is he talking about? Public projects funded by the government?  Commercial construction financed by business and industry? Private homes? What? I mean, there’s a big damned difference indeed between the new 400 million dollar Pensacola Bay Bridge currently being built between Pensacola and Gulf Breeze by the State of Florida and the new Trump Hotel currently building in Cleveland, Mississippi, under Trump’s Scion brand managed by Eric and Donald Trump Jr.

That’s the very crux of this part: We built the Empire State Building in just one year.

We?

We who?

The Empire State Building was constructed beginning in 1930 by a group of wealthy investors, known as Empire State Inc. These people were accountable only to themselves and their investors. They intended to build a building on a two-acre plot in Manhattan, a city made of buildings and an area specifically zoned for buildings. Unsurprisingly, there was little resistance from the city or much need for public input. And in fact, the city and the public, in the grip of the Great Depression, were quite enthusiastic about building a big building on a site zoned for buildings in a city full of buildings using private money. So it didn’t take very long to get the permits needed to begin construction.

Now, compare that to similar public works of that time.

Public works such as the Hoover Dam. Construction of the dam began in 1931, but it took more than 30 years of speculation, design, review, regulation, planning, public meetings, litigation, acquisition of land via purchase and Eminent Domain, and legislation to get there.  Construction would create thousands of jobs, but if the dam failed, hundreds of thousands of lives would be at risk. Billions of taxpayer dollars would be lost. Environmental damage would be catastrophic and would likely alter the very geography of the region permanently. The dam would change the political balance of the Southwest and determine both electrical power and water rights (and thus everything else from industrialization to agriculture to raising up entire cities to things as prosaic as golf courses) for the next thousand years. In the face of that, 30 years of development doesn’t seem all that unreasonable.

It took six years to build the dam, two years less than originally planned, in harsh remote terrain far from any support.

The Hoover Dam went into operation in 1936. That same year, the Empire State Building was losing more than $1 million dollars per year and there was no public elevator service above the 45th floor because the building was empty between the 41st floor and 81st. As a matter of fact, the Empire State Building didn’t even start to break even, profit wise, until the mid-1950s. And that’s fine, when it’s private investor money they’re losing. It’s a whole different ballgame when it’s a public facility funded by tax dollars.

Isn’t it a disgrace that it can now take ten years just to get a minor permit approved for the building of a simple road.

No. It’s not.

And it’s utterly disingenuous, not to mention a logical fallacy, to compare construction of a private building to the permitting process for public works, especially across the span of a century.

Moreover, a “simple road” doesn’t typically take anywhere near a decade to get approved. And “simple roads” are rarely constructed by the federal government, those are usually state and local projects. For example, here in my area – the small Florida Panhandle town of Milton – a developer purchased several acres of land along my morning bike path and began the construction of a dozen houses. That developer got permits to build what will become public road through the housing development, connecting to existing roads. Now, obviously, a study needed to be done. Basic things: who would pay for maintenance and upkeep of the new road? The city? The state? How? Via new tax dollars from the new houses? A millage? How often will it have to be paved? Will this new road need lights, signals, signs, culverts, etc. You can’t just add new roads without some sort of planning, not if you expect the city and state to maintain the infrastructure. Not if you expect taxpayers to foot the bill. Not if you expect the city and state planners to be able to put together a budget. Not if you expect the police to patrol it. And the postal service to deliver mail. And the electrical co-op and Water & Sewage to run utilities. And so on. I looked it up, from the time the developer began purchasing the land to the time ground was broken for the first house was less than six months, including permits for that “simple road.” Hardly “ten years.”

This is true in large part all across the country.

But we’re not really talking about “simple roads,” are we? And neither was Trump.

We’re talking about major projects, public works. Like the Pensacola Bay Bridge mentioned up above.

That bridge, when completed, will replace the current bridge which is 60 years old. It will be more than three miles long and will carry more than 60,000 vehicles per day, in addition to bicycle and foot traffic. It will have to stand up to Category 5 hurricanes – and it is the major evacuation route for hundreds of thousands of people. It will have to last more than 50 years and it will have to support a growing population, not to mention vehicles and traffic we can’t even envision yet. If it fails, it will be catastrophic. If it damages the environment, it will be a disaster for the local tourist and fishing industries. If it can’t meet the needs of the future, it will be a chokehold on business, on populations, and on development. If it’s poorly designed, if it can’t stand up to the environment, it will be an endless drain on public money. And it has to be built around the existing bridge without impacting traffic, business, emergency evacuation routes, or sea traffic on the inland waterway.

Now, I submit to you that might take some study.

It requires extensive planning, design, public input, permitting, and review. And that may take years.

If Trump’s hotel goes bust, or burns down, or stays empty because he planned poorly, he can go bankrupt and stick it to his investors.

But perhaps a decade isn’t really all that long for development when you’re talking about a public project that costs $400,000,000, impacts the lives of 60,000 drivers per day not to mention the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands in the surrounding communities, and is going to be with us for most of the next century.

Let me give you an example of what happens when you don’t do due diligence, when you rush things.

A few years before construction started on the Hoover Dam, there was another dam.

You might, or might not, have heard of it.

It was a large concrete gravity dam, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles, built in 1926 by a guy named William Mulholland, a self-taught engineer, for the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply.

Now, in 1926, at the height of the roaring 20s, the economy was booming. The stock market was at an all time high. The city of Los Angeles was likewise booming, the population nearly doubling from 1910. The city had planned to build a dam in Big Tujunga Canyon, but Mulholland was incensed by the prices owners in that area were demanding for their land. He considered it robbery, extortion, and an attempt to derail progress, and said so, loudly. 

This period was also known as the California Water Wars, with cities and ranchers fighting armed battles over water rights and land – much like today’s conservative libertarians fighting the federal government over use of federal properties.

Rather than accede to the land owners’ demands, Mulholland chose the San Francisquito Canyon in the Sierra Pelona Mountains and named his project The St. Francis Dam.

Construction began quietly, so as not to attract public notice. Despite some rather troublesome problems with the local geology, the dam was completed quickly and ahead of schedule and began to fill on March 12th, 1926.

Problems began almost immediately. Leaks. Cracks. Armed ranchers.

Over the next two years, the dam slowly filled, until it was at capacity, 38,000 acre feet of water, rising nearly 180 feet above the valley floor.

Cracks kept appearing at an increasing rate and the soil around the dam became saturated with water. Mulholland and his engineers were called repeatedly by the dam keeper for each new problem, but they dismissed the concerns and ordered various drains and patches.

On March 12, 1928, exactly two years from the day the reservoir began to fill, the St Francis Dam failed. Catastrophically. No witnesses survived the actual event. The dam failed so completely and so suddenly that the entire reservoir, 38,000 acre feet – that’s something in the neighborhood of 12 billion gallons – emptied in less than 70 minutes. A flood 140 feet high killed the dam keeper’s family a mile below the dam. Five minutes later, the deluge, still 120 feet high, destroyed the power stations and killed the electricians and their families who lived in a small town nearby. The flood roared downstream, wiping out ranches and electrical workers and the towns of Fillmore, Bardsdale, and Santa Paula, before pouring into the Pacific Ocean. Bodies were found as far away as Mexico. 431 people died. Tens of thousands were displaced. The environmental damage was catastrophic, as was the damage to property and infrastructure. The monetary loss was in the billions, in 1928 dollars.

Now, before you tell me that engineering has advanced greatly since then, try to remember that the Hoover Dam was built only 4 years later. And in fact, many of the nation’s great works stem from that time, dams, highways, bridges, and etc. 

That said, you don’t have to do much digging to find similar catastrophes, dam failures, bridge collapses, and so on. Hell, there are cable TV programs nightly showing an endless parade of engineering disasters.

One of the reasons permitting takes longer these days is because we, supposedly, have learned from our mistakes, learned from the past. For example: If you were paying attention up above, you saw where I wrote “self-taught engineer” after William Mulholland’s name. We don’t allow that any more either, engineers in every state must meet the requirements and accreditation set forth by their state board of engineers. In California, licensing of engineers began specifically because of Mulholland’s spectacular failure.

Yes, we are a nation of builders.

But nowadays, our buildings, our bridges, our roads, must carry a volume greater than any previous. More, they must anticipate what is to come. And now we must design skyscrapers to withstand the deliberate impact of a jetliner full of fuel, something our ancestors never had to worry about.

Still, our buildings, dams, bridges, and roads are safer than any project built in previous decades. And while jobs are a nice side effect of such works, they aren’t the reason for them. These projects are designed to serve the public, to benefit the nation, to advance future generations. And if they are to withstand the test of ages, then we must not only take the time to build them right, but take the time to ensure they best serve not only the current public interest and that of future generations as well.

America is a nation of builders. We built the Empire State Building in just one year. Isn’t it a disgrace that it can now take ten years just to get a minor permit approved for the building of a simple road?

Every major media outlet in the world has spent thousands of hours over the last two days analyzing Trump’s State of the Union Speech. I’m not going to repeat their work.

It’s just wasted motion.

There is no point in analyzing every statement from Trump’s State of the Union address.

Every point, every single one, is the same as this, empty statements wrapped around logical fallacies that say essentially nothing upon examination.  Each point of Trump’s address serves only to demonstrate Trump’s profound ignorance of history and the basic functions of both civilization and good government.

More, it demonstrates the shallow mindless unthinking patriotism of those who would cheer him.

And in that regard, ironically, Trump’s address is indeed a testament to the sorry state of our union.