Florida continues to see more COVID-19 cases and increasing hospitalizations as the state ramps up vaccination efforts against the virus.
— Read on www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/07/30/florida-averages-15780-cases-per-day-as-delta-variant-continues-fueling-surge/
We are back in top- exceeding the highest numbers of covid since we started. Clearly florida does not have rhis figirrd out!!
Wr
apple.news/AtFxsvUKuSOColhvw6prnGw
Tulsa, 1921. You will hear about this all weekend if you haven’t already. Tulsa happened and we need to acknowledge that it did. It was not one of our finer moments. In fact just the opposite. Tulsa is what hate can bring. It is what demonizing other people can cause. In a short span of time over 300 innocent people died, hundreds injured, hundreds rounded up like cattle. Why? Because they were black and successful. This is why we should not tolerate hate speech. And why there should be consequences for same. Remember the past so we can avoid it in the future.
The troubling aspect of that is that Governing magazine reports that many state are likely to see less revenue in 2017 vs 2016. Governing‘s analysis of projected 2017 budget data from the National Association of State Budget Officers shows shows states now have a median 4.9 percent of annual expenditures saved for the fiscal year, down from 5.1 percent the previous year. Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey and North Dakota have no reserves as of 2017. They add to Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Montana who had no reserves last year. And Alaska that is burning though theirs. Economic and tax policies are to blame. The Kansas solution to cut taxes to create economic growth has not worked. The state continues to get farther behind and it is becoming harder to pretend all is well. Having no reserves is a crazy bad idea. It is hard to explain just how crazy bad this idea is – it means that if a negative economic issue occurs, these states are in huge trouble unless they start cutting education and other essential services. The best way to get out of a budget hole is not cutting education – the one thing needed to dig out and attract new economic activity. Clearly these officials did not learn from 2008-2011 when there reserves were depleted to address the economic downturn. That makes no sense and dooms their residents to a repeat of 2009/2010, only worse.
Many communities that have issue with older infrastructure may suffer from loss of economic opportunities (Flint, Detroit, Cleveland). This compounds the problem with local capacity for maintenance and report of infrastructure. Many of these issues result from the lack of funding due to the unwillingness of local officials to raise water rates and address hidden infrastructure. Others may feel limited due to the loss of economic activity – Rust Belt cities and the northeast are older; inner cities may be more impacted. Different areas of the country will have different needs and maybe different magnitudes of need. Rural communities may not have funding to replace infrastructure. The first community that abandoned their system was rural. Newer communities with newer pipe will have far less needs today, but few are taking steps to avoid the infrastructure pitfalls that have hit older communities. Ultimately these conditions make for a huge backlog of deferred infrastructure investments, mostly in pipe and service lines beneath roads. The only good news is that by correcting the piping, much of the roadway base issues could also be resolved concurrently.
A concurrent problem in the communities hardest hit with infrastructure issues is often that there is pool of skilled labor, but said labor may not be skilled in areas to address their own infrastructure problems. Likewise youths may be challenged to find work local. The solution to both issues may be similar to that posed by the CETA programs in the late 1970s. In those programs local and state governments were given funds to hire staff to be trained for certain jobs, with the intention that these trained workers would become part of a permanent, expanded workforce. A similar solution today as a part of an infrastructure bill could be to provide local and state governments for funding for personnel to be trained to perform such work. The workers could receive training on safety, OSHA issues, and equipment from a local community college or university that would be paid for by the infrastructure bill. These same people would then be hired by local governments to perform rehabilitation and replacement work, fully funded initially by the federal government s but with an anticipated transition period where by 10 years out, the workforce could be demonstrated to have been expended as a result of the program.
Note that hiring by local governments is a key. Private sector hiring tends to be job specific and the jobs disappear when the activity moves or ceases. Hence finding the private sector likely leads only to a temporary increase in labor development. Local government hiring would more likely increase permanent employment. The local agencies would need to be given an incentive to encourage this since far too many elected officials see government employment as a negative thing. This is partly why we have the infrastructure quagmire today. That attitude needs to change.
The private sector will want their share, and privatization is a confounding issue because people get laid off through privatization and indications are that the middle class gets hurt by privatization (lower wages for the same job). But the public sector does not manufacture pipe, equipment like backhoes and rollers and other materials would be paid to private vendors in accordance with local and state bid rules. That would move monies for capital to private vendors. For large projects the work rules could be applied to contractors much like the ARRA funding requirements – shovel ready and US materials and newly trained staff making up a portion of the work force. That would meet the tenets of local jobs, fixing local problems with federal dollars for a period of time, perhaps as a mix of grants and low interest loans.
At least 20 years of infrastructure needs exist. Hence the longer term program could be sustained. A funding mechanism is in place via state revolving fund programs for a portion of the effort, much like the water, sewer and stormwater funds were channeled through the SRF programs under the ARRA program. WIFIA and other programs could be used as a dispersal agent, so new bureaucracies would not need to be created. A prior pattern for implementation is in place and would just need to be “dusted” off an updated. Bi-partisan support enacted these program in the past and it would seem this would be good for all.
The potential for concern would be raised by private utilities (power, cable, telephone and private water and sewer utilities) which would be effectively shut out of funding, but they are private entities and they have the ability to raise funds on the private equity market. Capitalism will work well for these organizations, but it does not for most local public works infrastructure systems. That is why they are public, not private. Some local governments would resist the requirement to expand the workforce – but that is their choice – a requirement to participate is not implied just as it is not with SRF funds. Local business communities would likely drive the effort to be involved.
So now we wait and see if anything happens……
The election and post-election discussions have included some concepts about funding for infrastructure. While this may have been more focused had Clinton been elected, it remains a discussion topic in the Trump White House. How it would be manifested is a question, with Trump’s faction discussion private cash influxes to make this happen. The Senate seems to view infrastructure as DOA, which means nothing might occur. However, in any instances, there needs to be a definition of the word infrastructure and what would qualify for funding. There are three basic types of infrastructure – public, private and regulated private. Most SRF programs limit recipients of funding to public entities.
The infrastructure in the public arena falls into three categories which have vastly different types of infrastructures:
Local – water, sewer, stormwater/drainage, local roads, limited bridges. In larger communities, rail and airports might be included, but the latter is mostly federal subsidies. Much of water and sewer infrastructure is over 50 years old and is showing signs of weakening. Buried pipelines are the most at risk. This would include the 6 million lead services lines in place. Sewer lines are primarily vitrified clay, also 50+ years old and likely cracked. Stormwater is corrugated metal and concrete. Roadway bases in most communities are historical and do not meet today’s standards. Hence ASCE rates these a D or D-. Municipal buildings in older communities may also have lead services, asbestos, wood and galvanized pipelines, and other issues to address. The majority of infrastructure under this definition is under local control.
State – highways and bridges – much of America’s commerce depends on these roadways. 25% of bridges need work, 10% are deficient. Funding for rail and airports is a need from a state perspective. States may spend more money on transportation that all other infrastructure combined.
Federal – these are very large scale projects like dikes, dams, reservoirs and water transmission systems. It also includes national parks ($11 billion deficiency), and federal buildings. The dikes in New Orleans are an example. However a lot of the funds for these projects are disseminated to locals (like New Orleans), so the actual use may be unclear.
The literature suggests that public investments in infrastructure create at least a 4:1 return. Good infrastructure is necessary for a vibrant economy. Deteriorating infrastructure leads to …. Flint, New Orleans after Katrina, and a host of obvious failures. The impact of climate on communities, particularly sea level rise, can be partially addressed with infrastructure improvements. Large scale construction can secure jobs both immediately and for the foreseeable future. The question then is how to secure finding that will lead to jobs, lead to economic development and return on those investments, and will make notable improvements. That is the challenge at all three levels. The easiest to address from a sill perspective is state roads and local infrastructure. From a state perspective the work is focused on highways and transportation. Locally, the benefit is the local labor force that requires no travel or added overhead. Just training. So the question is whether an infrastructure bill can/should have a jobs component built in?
Every water body will be different but in southeast Florida there are a couple options for Lake Okeechobee’s waters. One option has been in discussion for years – buy back the EAA lands and restore the Everglades flow. That has two benefits – improved water quality, and less potential for east-west releases. The downside is cost. But the sugar industry knows that the muck layer is decreasing and there are plans to develop the EAA into hundreds of thousands of housing units. That was not the intention in the 1940s when the EAA was created, but trying to stop someone from developing land, especially when the lake communities are challenged economically, is difficult. Buying the land would remove it from production, but decrease tax revenues. And it would need to be managed with no guarantee that it would cleaned up quickly.
The alternative? The South Florida Sun-Sentinel had a front page article that is a little scary. The figure below is reproduced from that article. The discussion was if there is no conservation/public purchase of land, Florida may look very different. The impact of not buying the land is development. More people. More taxes. More stormwater. The fertilizer does not go away – it now fertilizes lawns and golf courses. Add wastewater, and human activities. We find that urban living and farming can have similar impacts from a nutrient perspective. So development may exacerbate the problem and given that our modeling indicates that sea level rise imperils inland communities from groundwater, this is not a solution to coastal risk. Given limitations with local governments inland, it may create a larger crisis. All there things need discussion, but the question is – will the algal issues on the coast improve?
http://www.pressreader.com/usa/sun-sentinel-palm-beach-edition/20160916/281479275879132/textviewer worse?
The most important parameters regulating algal growth are nutrient quantity and quality, light, pH, turbulence, salinity and temperature. Light is the most limiting factor for algal growth, followed by nitrogen and phosphorus limitations, but other nutrients are required including carbon. Biomass is usually measured by the amount of chlorophyll a in the water column. Water temperature influences the metabolic and reproductive rates of algae. Most species grow best at a salinity that is slightly lower than that of their native habitat, The pH range for most cultured algal species is between 7 and 9, with the optimum range being 8.2-8.7. Through photosynthesis, algae produce oxygen in excess of respiratory requirements during daylight hours. Conversely, during low light or nighttime periods algae respire (consume) dissolved oxygen, sometimes depleting water column concentrations. Thus, high algae concentrations may lead to low dissolved oxygen concentrations.
A common solution for algae is copper sulfate. Copper Sulfate works to kill the algae, but when it dies, it settles to the bottom of the water body where it becomes a carbon source for bacteria and future algae. One will often see shallow ponds with rising algae. But there is significant concern about copper in coastal water bodies. Copper is toxic to marine organisms so USEPA and other regulatory bodies are considering the limits on copper use. Such a limitation would severely limit options in dealing with algal blooms near coastal waters.
Mixing is necessary to prevent sedimentation of the algae, to ensure that all cells of the population are equally exposed to the light and nutrients. So oxygenation can help (it also mixes the water. The depth of south Florida water bodies is problematic (shallow and therefore warmer than normal). But oxygen will help microorganisms on the bottom consume the carbon source on the bottom, which might slow algal growth. Analysis is ongoing.
Two other conditions work against controlling blue-green algae outbreaks: climate change and political/regulatory decision-making. Lake Okeechobee has routine algal blooms from the nutrients introduced from agriculture and runoff around the lake, which encouraged an artificial eutrophication of the lake years ago. It continues today. Warmer weather will encourage the algal blooms in the future. The decisions to discharge the water without treatment is a political one. From a regulatory perspective, algae is seen as a nuisance issue, not a public health or environmental issue. But algal blooms consume oxygen and kill fish, so the ecosystem impact is considerable – it is not a nuisance .
The term algae encompass a variety of simple structures, from single-celled phytoplankton floating in the water, to large seaweeds. Algae can be single-celled, filamentous or plant-like, anchored to the bottom. Algae are aquatic, plant-like organisms – phytoplankton. Phytoplankton provides the basis for the whole marine food chain. Phytoplankton need light to photosynthesize so will therefore float near the top of the water, where sunlight reaches it. Light is the most limiting factor for algal growth, followed by nitrogen and phosphorus limitations), but other nutrients are required including carbon, silica, and other micronutrients. These microscopic organisms are common in coastal areas. They proliferate through cell division.
A natural progression occurs in many water bodies, from diatoms, to green algae to yellow/brown to blue-green, with time and temperature. The environment is important. Southern waters are characterized as being slow moving, and warm. This encourages cyanobacteria – or blue green algae. The introduction of nutrients is particularly difficult as it accelerates the formation of the blue green algae. Blue-green algae creates the bright green color, but is actually an end-of-progression organism.
If cells are present in the water mass in large numbers an algal bloom occurs. An algal bloom is simply a rapid increase in the population of algae in an aquatic system. Blooms may occur in freshwater as well as marine environments. Colors observed are green, bright green, brown, yellowish-brown, or red, although typically only one or a few phytoplankton species are involved and some blooms may be recognized by discoloration of the water resulting from the high density of pigmented cells.
So the desire for development created the idea to drain the swamp, which led to exposure of dark, productive soil that led to farming, which lead to fertilizers, which led to too much water, and water pollution leading to algae. A nice, predictable progression created by people. So what is the solution?
We have all seen the stories about land in the Everglades agricultural Area thissummer. I was asked to give a presentation at a national conference in Orlando recently about water management in Florida. It was a fun paper and most of the people there were not from Florida, so it was useful for them to understand the land of water. Florida has always been a land shaped by water. Initially it was too much, which frustrated federal soldiers trying to hunt down Native Americans in the 1830s. In 1881, real estate developer Hamilton Disston first tried to drain the swamps with canals. He was not successful, but Henry Flagler came through a decade later and constructed the east coast railroad in the 1890s. It is still there, 2 miles off the coast, on the high ground. However water limited development so in 1904, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward campaigned to drain the everglades. Broward’s efforts initiated the first land boom in Florida, although it was interrupted in the 1920s by hurricanes (1926 and 1928) that sloshed water out of Lake Okeechobee killing people and severely damaging property in Miami and around Lake Okeechobee. A dike was built (the Hover dike – it is still there). However, an extended drought occurred in the 1930s. With the dike preventing water from leaving Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades became parched. Peat turned to dust, and saltwater entered Miami’s wells. When the city brought in an expert to investigate, he found that the water in the Everglades was the recharge area for the Biscayne aquifer, the City’s water supply. Hence water from the lake needed to move south.
Resiliency has always been one of Florida’s best attributes. So while the hurricanes created a lot of damage, it was only a decade or two later before the boom returned. But in the late 1940s, additional hurricanes hit Florida, causing damage and flooding from Lake Okeechobee prompting Congress to direct the Army Corps of Engineers to build 1800 miles of canals, dozens of pump stations and other structures to drain the area south of Lake Okeechobee. It is truly one of the great wonders of the world – they drained half a state by lowering the groundwater table by gravity canals. To improve resiliency, between 1952 and 1954, the Corps, in cooperation with the state of Florida, built a levee 100 miles long between the eastern Everglades and the developing coastal area of southeast Florida to prevent the swamp from impacting the area primed for development.
As a part of the canal construction after 1940, 470,000 acres of the Everglades was set aside for farming on the south side of Lake Okeechobee and designated as the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). However water is inconsistent, so there are ongoing flood/drought cycles in agriculture. Irrigation in the EAA is fed by a series of canals that are connected to larger ones through which water is pumped in or out depending on the needs of the sugar cane and vegetables, the predominant crops. Hence water is pumped out of the EAA, laden with nutrients. Backpumping to Lake Okeechobee and pumping the water conservation areas was a practice used to address the flooding problem.
There was an initial benefit to Lake Okeechobee receiving nutrients. Older folks will recall that in the 1980s , the lake was the prime place for catching lunker bass. That was because the lake was traditionally nutrient poor. That changed with the backpumping which stimulated the biosystem productivity. More production led to more biota and more large fish. This works as long as the system is in balance e- i.e. the nutrients need to be growth limiting at the lower end of the food chain. Otherwise the runaway nutrients overwhelm the natural production and eutrophication results. Lake Okeechobee is a runaway system – the algae now overwhelm the rest of the biota. Lunker bass have been gone for 20 years.
The backpumped water is usually low in oxygen and high in phosphorus and nitrogen, which triggers algal progressions, leading to toxic blue-green algae blooms and threaten lake drinking water supplies. Think Toledo. Prolonged back pumping can lead to dead zones in the lake, which currently exist. The nutrient cycle and algal growth is predictable.
The Hoover Dike is nearly 100 years old and while it sit on top of the land (19 ft according to the Army Corps of Engineers), there is concern about it being breached by sloshing or washouts. Undermining appears in places where the water moves out of the lake flooding nearby property. So the Corps tries to keep the water level below 15.5 ft. During the rainy season, or a rainy winter as in 2016, that can become difficult. If the lake is full, that nutrient laden water needs to go somewhere. The only options are the Caloosahatchee, St. Lucie River or the everglades. The Everglades is not the answer for untreated water – the upper Everglades has thousands of acres of cattails to testify to the problem with discharges to the Everglades. So the water gets discharged east and west via the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie River.
The nutrient and algae laden water manifests as a green slime that washed onto Florida beaches in the Treasure coast and southwest Florida this summer, algae is actually a regular visitor to the coasts. Unfortunately memories often fail in temporal situations. The summer 2016 occurrence is reportedly the eighth since 2004, and the most severe since 2013. The green slime looks bad, can smell bad, kills fish and the 2016 bloom was so large it spread through estuaries on both coasts killing at least one manatee. One can see if from the air – try this link:
“Or is running a local government like s business killing it?”
I had an interesting conversation at a conference recently. The people I was talking to were advanced in their careers and the discussion moved toward the outlook on management in public settings. Once upon a time, most public works and utility managers were civil engineers, but often they were criticized because they were focused on the engineering aspects as opposed to the people aspects of the community. Their focus was public health and making sure things operated correctly. Most did whatever was needed to accomplish that.
This led to schools of public administration, which actually started educating some of those same engineers about management of large public organizations, organizational theory, human resource, accounting and planning I did all that myself at UNC-Chapel Hill. The goal was to understand finances, people, community outreach, the need to engage citizens and as well as public service. The outcomes were providing good service. That however tends to cost a little more than operations although there are opportunities to be a bit entrepreneurial.
So back to the people in the conversation. They noted that sometime in the 1980s or early 1990s the MPAs were being replaced by MBAs as politicians were focusing on operating “like a business.” Looking at the MBAs out there, the comment was that business schools do not focus on service, but profits to shareholders, and the training is to cut unproductive pieces that detract from the bottom line. Hence investments do not get made if the payback is not immediate. Service is not a priority unless it helps the bottom line. In a monopoly (like a local government), there are no other option, so service becomes a lessor priority.
So it brought up an interesting, but unanswerable question for now: has the move to more business trained people in government created some of the ills we see? The discussion included the following questions/observations (summarized here):
Interestingly though was the one business piece that was missing: Marketing the value of the product (which is different than customer service). Marketing water seems foreign to the business manager in the public sector. The question arising there is whether that is a political pressure as opposed to a forgotten part of the education.
I would love to hear some thoughts…
publicutilitymanagement 