Philadelphia Weekly

Food
Drink
Arts & Culture
- Art
- Stage
- PW Style Blog
- InsideOut
- Comedy
- Events Guide
- Submit An Event
- Subscribe to RSS
Music
- Columns:
- Stereotypewriter
- Subscribe to RSS
- On the Record
Screen
News & Opinion
- Columns:
- Savage Love
- Subscribe to RSS
Multimedia
Events
Real Estate
MarketPlace

NEWS AND OPINION

A Little Stimulus In Philadelphia

SEPTA and the Water Department get a needed boost from the stimulus package.

By Michael Fichman

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Mar. 17, 2009

Photo by Tim Gough

Philadelphia, like the rest of the country, has turned its eyes to Washington, D.C., waiting anxiously to see the results of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. And the city has profited. Late this spring, local public agencies will break ground on their shovel-ready stimulus projects.

Many of these projects are unsexy, utilitarian attempts to upgrade or modernize crumbling infrastructure, like the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) rebuild of a steel and concrete pier near the airport in South Philadelphia. After a few dozen local carpenters, laborers and divers get done with the project, the pier will continue to offload solid sewage waste for barge transport to a landfill or recycling facility.

The impact of the stimulus money on that project will be that sewer services won’t grind to a halt, sewer rates won’t go up and several dozen workers won’t lose their jobs. The pier may have been rebuilt this year anyway—all the plans were already in place. But now the money that was slated for use in the pier rebuild can be used elsewhere—if that money doesn’t evaporate in the recession’s ether.

Each stimulus-funded capital project is like the fall of the first domino. The whole row will fall only if local agencies can use the windfall to free up money for their huge backlog of deferred maintenance and infrastructure projects—putting local contractors, engineers and consultants to work while enhancing the region’s competitiveness. But as with seemingly everything these days, dreams for a new, growing Philadelphia are tempered by the instability of the capital markets.

One of the many projects SEPTA plans to undertake with the anticipated $200 million in stimulus money is the renovation of the Broad Street subway stations at Spring Garden and Girard. The stations, which were built in the 1920s, handle thousands of commuters each day.

“It’s always nice to cut a ribbon and have a party,” says Richard Maloney, SEPTA director of public affairs, “but the more important issue is that we’re continuing to rebuild an old system to bring it up to current operational and safety standards. [It’s] a large infrastructure project of new fiber optics and safety systems.”

Joseph Clare, the Philadelphia Water Department’s deputy commissioner of finance, says the replacement value of PWD assets, like the biosolids pier, is near $50 billion.

“The problem we’re facing is that we have far more infrastructure than we can get bonds for and replace,” Clare says. “The stimulus money gives us the ability to put a dent in accelerating the replacement.”

Some projects will get done, that’s for certain, but what about the rest of the dominoes—the projects and jobs of tomorrow, next year and beyond?

Page: 1 2 3 |Next