GetAbout Columbia still $5.9 million short of finishing the job | From the Roundtable

It’s been a great ride for some of us. I’m talking about a $22 million federal grant we’ve been burning through over the past three years that was designed to steer us away from motorized transportation. That adds up to $202.76 spent for each of Columbia’s 108,500 residents. It’s called “GetAbout Columbia,” and for a while the project sported a nice office facing the Boone Courthouse (space now for lease) and a well-compensated director to boot.

Our streets have been slathered with new painted lines and symbols. On a portion of West Boulevard South, the center line has been moved 2 feet east of its original alignment. Trails and bike paths have been designated across town with construction, and we’re told completion is well under way. The community has had time to cluck about the six-figure salary paid to the project’s imported overseer. Then maybe we’ve been awestruck over the high six-figure amount dispensed for promotion and creative work that ended up with a local marketing firm.
Maybe the end of this grandiosity is in sight. Um, no, it turns out we’re $5.9 million shy of the funds needed to wrap up this whole affair. So where did the money go? At this point no one seems especially curious, concerned or even outraged. If such an overrun occurred in the private sector, there’d be an investigation and a detailed line-item accounting of funds both received and dispensed. The directors would fume, and maybe a head or two would roll. Perhaps the press and the increasingly competitive blogosphere would awaken and become agitated.
We’re no longer amazed that somewhere in the super-sized fattened sow of federal largess there just happens to be another $5.9 million cubby-holed somewhere in the catacombs of Washington ready to rocket out to Columbia so we can finish building our bike paths and paint more lines and symbols because we somehow managed to burn through the original $22 million. Maybe the feds will borrow the money from Andorra or San Remo, though most of us know it will be the Chinese who come to our aid because they’re the real sugar daddy behind much of today’s federal largess.
Here’s a curious twist of simple arithmetic: The $5.9 million federal grant to cover the “GetAbout” imbroglio would cover the operating deficit of the city’s public transportation system for two years — an enterprise far more essential to our full-service city and in need of support.
Some of us have been riding bicycles forever and climbed aboard our first velocipede not long after we learned how to walk. Maybe we trained on a Huffy Convertable (with removable wheels) and graduated to a fat-tired, made-in-U.S.A. Schwinn. We envied the really cool dudes who mowed lots of lawns or tossed newspapers to save up for a sleek imported English Racer (with three-speed Sturmey-Archer gear shift) fitted with clothespin-secured cards flapping against the spokes to make more noise.
In the milieu of contemporary, lightweight, derailleur-equipped bicycles, the essential question is what will we have to show after three years and almost $30 million spent on this nonmotorized transportation demonstration project.
Perhaps this has been a nice, albeit temporary, fillip for the local problem. But it illustrates that somehow this country is going to have to cool the urge to splurge. Of course we were not about to spurn these grants we were in line to receive. The time will come when arteriosclerosis in the pipeline of federal spending causes these spending party needs to come to an end.