THE SILVER LINING TO CLIMATE ADAPTATION -- Part 13

The High Cost of Resiliency Efforts and the Hope that 

Lies in Wise Government Planning and Spending

Blanchard, who understands the negative impact of sprawl, worked with Strong Towns when he was with Consolidated Lafayette Parish/City.

Charles Marohn, a transportation engineer by training, runs the nonprofit Strong Towns, which is dedicated to making communities financially strong and resilient. Marohn’s 2017 report “The Real Reason Your City Has No Money,” focused on Lafayette, a city of 125,000, as the typical example of a city that has made itself virtually insolvent by growing horizontally instead of compactly.

“When we added up the replacement cost of all of the city’s infrastructure — an expense we would anticipate them cumulatively experiencing roughly once a generation — it came to $32 billion. 

When we added up the entire tax base of the city, all of the private wealth sustained by that infrastructure, it came to just $16 billion.

This is fatal,” Marohn wrote. His team’s estimate didn’t include underground utilities — sewer and water — or major facilities such as treatment plants, water towers and public buildings. 

Adding that cost, Strong Towns estimated that just to take care of existing infrastructure, a family at the median income of $41,000 would have to spend one out of every five dollars on taxes needed to fix roads, ditches and pipes. 

“That will never happen,” Marohn observed. 

Marohn said he isn’t picking on Lafayette, because virtually all cities buy into a “Growth Ponzi Scheme” that chases rapid growth by expanding horizontally. 

Growth provides immediate revenues — permit fees, utility fees, property tax increases, sales tax — but the city takes on the long-term responsibility of servicing and maintaining all the new infrastructure.