From the Roundtable: Boonville Bridge deal a costly boondoggle

Let’s salute the Union Pacific Transportation Company for pulling off a really sweet deal with the taxpayers of Missouri. Sweet for UP, anyway — a deal that gets the private, shareholder-owned company a railroad bridge across the Osage River worth millions of dollars in return for giving up the unusable Boonville Bridge.
More trumpets, please, and a special shout-out to Boonville for pulling off its own sweet deal — for a dollar. After luring a casino to the riverfront a while back, the little town deftly lassoed that elephantine hulk of a railroad bridge spanning the Mighty Missouri. I’ll bet that someday Boonville will rue forking over 100 pennies to purchase that rusty, obsolescent hunk of steel. Any takers?
Finally, our sympathies go to the U.S. Coast Guard for failing to have the span removed as a hazard to navigation as it should have been years ago.
The boggling sum of enhancement to UP is impressive: $23 million. But there’s a multiplier depending on who’s counting. This sudden stroke of public largesse conveniently upsets a previous arrangement that would have used private capital to dismantle and recycle the center span of the antique structure and float it downstream to double-track and span the UP mainline across the Osage River. Scarce federal funds allocated to Missouri for railroad improvement projects statewide will end up largely squandered on a single item — an expenditure that would have been unnecessary if the state stuck with the solution arranged several years ago.
Of course, the larger issue these days is getting the state’s fragile economy back on track. It’s tiresome watching dollars thrown around helter-skelter for what are essentially short-term projects providing temporary employment and often requiring specialized skills. A sign (what did that cost?) at the northwest corner of College Avenue and East Walnut Street trumpets sidewalk improvements costing one-fifth of a million dollars. It’s incredible that the labor and materials could cost that much, but apparently they do. Thank you, Davis-Bacon Act of 1931.
Ideally, the jobs we really need should be permanent and well-paying. If there’s anything we need to pay attention to, it’s retaining and enhancing the tens of thousands of positions in our area that provide the economic fuel that keeps the financial fires raging.
We all speak — somewhat tiresomely, I might add — of economic development and echo a chorus heard ’round the world. It’s unlikely Columbia will ever score another large factory or large manufacturing operation, but the area’s touts remain strong centered on the celebrated employer base of the University of Missouri, two colleges, medicine, insurance, research, government, contracting, construction and retail, which places us well for recovery and future gains.
The cautionary tale the Boonville Bridge deal provides for both Columbia and Boone County is that we must avoid questionable, financially draining “investments” and entanglements with outdated artifacts such as deactivated railroad bridges. For a dollar, what used to be a headache for Union Pacific is now Boonville’s to fret over. Good luck!
One wishes them well as they arrange to paint and otherwise repair and maintain this old beast the city will develop as a “tourist attraction.” It baffles me how the ramps and approaches will be arranged. And I view as guesses-gone-wild the prediction that legions of old bridge enthusiasts flooding from all over will bring sales and lodging tax increases. Could wildly optimistic financial projections derived from Boonville’s old bridge project challenge the demonstrably wacky projections for Columbia’s grossly under-performing YouZeum? To both of these undertakings, we wish you only our very best.