Street signs and other government-mandated boondoggles

Jerry Kremer

On Election Day, angry voters all over the country focused their attention on Congress, deficits, the Obama health care plan, taxes and numerous other grievances. Incumbent politicians got the brunt of it, and quite a few lost their seats in the House of Representatives.

Everyone assumes that the government wastes our dollars and forces us to pay more because of bureaucratic incompetence. They aren’t wrong. Let’s talk about one of the specific boondoggles, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Transportation. It deals with street signs. Yes, street signs.

It seems that sometime in 2009, the Department of Transportation created an 800-page “Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices.” Buried in the thick booklet was talk about how senior citizens can’t read the street signs on American highways because they’re all in capital letters.

The department concluded that there was sufficient outrage all over the country on the part of the senior citizen population to require that every street sign in America be replaced by signs with upper- and lower-case letters. There were no public hearings on the issue, and local governments have to take action on or before January 2018.

Being a senior citizen, I have no dispute with the needs of seniors. The Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires buildings to be handicapped-accessible, was a great step forward for the country and helped many an aging person, so the cost was worth it. Plus, it was a cost that had to be absorbed by many private building owners as well as taxpayers.

The street sign story is a different problem. A few weeks ago, CBS’s “60 Minutes” highlighted the fact that local governments all over America were in deep trouble and that upward of 500 were expected to default on their bond payments in 2011. The last thing the country needed — along with Nassau County, which is in deep financial trouble — was another costly federal directive.

For some reason, New York City gave immediate attention to the mandate and started replacing signs in the Bronx. The overall cost to the city for new signs is $27 million. Suburban Nassau and Suffolk counties expect to get hit up for about $3 million for unnecessary sign replacements.

Around the country, the story is just as ugly. The cash-strapped city of Milwaukee will have to spend $2 million, which is double its annual expenses for traffic control. In Dinwiddie County, Virginia, which has lots of roads but not many people, the cost comes to about $10 for every man, woman and child. The chairman of the Dinwiddie Board of Supervisors said he would “rather feed the hungry people than change a street sign.”

So how did this fiasco come about? It seems that the American Traffic Safety Services Association, which represents companies that make signs and the reflective materials used on them, lobbied hard for the new rules. And miracle of miracles, a study was produced to justify the changes. It was paid for by the 3M Corporation.

New York state’s school districts are required to place red reflective tape on the back of school buses thanks to the companies that got the Legislature to pass a law mandating the tape. There is no current estimate available on the cost, but multiply 20,000 school buses by some per-bus expense and it’s a lot of bucks.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, who obviously didn’t read his department’s manual, has gotten a lot of negative feedback from thousands of localities that can’t afford to replace their signs. The department now has a 45-day period of public comment on the new signage rules. Maybe LaHood was an innocent bystander or asleep, but at least he woke up in time to do something. I only get angry at specifics, and this is a very good reason to get angry with our government.

Jerry Kremer was a state assemblyman for 23 years, and chaired the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee for 12 years. He now heads Empire Government Strategies, a business development and legislative strategy firm. Comments about this column? JKremer@liherald.com.