With all the focus on our national problems and all the bad news out of Washington DC, you would think that most of our problems are the result of decisions made in Washington DC. What I am finding out is that we are making just a bad of decisions right here in the heart land. I live a few miles from a small down where non state and county roads are maintained by the local township. You would think that at the township level of government that your own neighbors would be concerned about how they are spending their own neighbor's tax money, but they are not. Check this out?
I live at the end of a 1/4 mile long dead end gravel township road. It has been that way for over 100 years. It can get dusty at times but I have always been able to get home with two wheel drive. There is one other house on the road that is only used part time in the summer. The mail man drives down my road to deliver mail to the only active mailbox on the dead end road. Some friends feel sorry for me that I live on a dirt road, but it is just fine with me. The bottom line is that for just one active mail box on 1/4 mile long dead end road, it is not worth it to improve the road. This is where I have a problem with local stupidity.
Between my road and the small town, there is another dead end dirt road about 1/2 mile long that also has one active mailbox on it and the local township has decided to dig out all the big rocks and pave the road. I don't know what it has and will cost, but it is several times the amount of taxes paid by that one mailbox. It seems that all the people in the township will have to pitch in to pay for this special road job. This road is in an area where the ground can freeze on a cleared road down to as much as 6 feet deep. The freeze and thaw can cause rocks down that deep to be pushed to the surface. This meant that they had to clear these rocks down to a depth of 6 feet before they could start to prepare the road bed. This is a good idea, but it means the road base is not well settled and should remain gravel for a couple of year to allow settling. The township in their wisdom paved the road within about a week of clearing out the large rocks. Stupid again, but it was not their money. It was the money of their friends and neighbors. That is the sick part. The people on the town council are not only stupid, they are sick.
When you think about different types of roads, dead end roads are in a special class. Because they are dead end, 99% of any traffic on the road is only for those homes on the road. They do not serve any "thru" traffic as do other roads. This alone should make them a special class of road that should require special consideration when it comes to spending tax payer's money on them, but that does not seem to have happened in this local case.
My position is that if you can't control how tax money is spent at the local level in the heart land, then how can we expect any different from Washington DC? When I asked about the stupid decision about the road, they said that other people had their dead end roads paved, so why shouldn't they. It is one of the common excuses that we keep hearing. People answer a question with a question. I asked, "why are we wasting money paving this road". The answer that I get, "what about those guys in DC"? You can see that we are not going to resolve from the top down, so it is my position that we will have to solve it from the top down and that means local and individually.
PS-----
If the supervisors of this rural township were not so totally stupid, one of them would have loaned the road department one of their game cameras so that the traffic on this dead end dirt road could have been monitored. I drive by this dead end road several times a day and for a period of 10 years I have never seen a car either coming or going. My guess is that there is only one car that uses the dead end road and it goes in and out no more than twice a day. With a little vision, that they don't have, they could collect the traffic use on each township road and use that to guide them. They could even calculate something like "car miles". The average miles a car drives on a mile of township roads. A little 4th grade math would be all that they would need.
