According to the Onondaga County Health Department, as of 2018, 10.4% of children living in Syracuse had elevated levels of lead in their blood. The city of Syracuse has demonstrated a keen awareness of this issue and successfully reduced that percentage from 17.1% in 2012. The efforts are laudable and necessary, but raise the question of how one of America’s most impoverished cities can be expected to handle this issue alone.

Government assistance is imperative. Syracuse and its citizens cannot do this alone. They need help from the state and national government — and with more than just lead.

But the quest for government funding is hard fought, especially when it comes to infrastructure.

While there is an overwhelming need for blood screenings and funding for repairs and temporary housing, it can be nearly impossible for a city like Syracuse to provide those services without help.

“I don’t think the city by itself has the financial basis to do that,” said David Driesen, a professor at SU’s College of Law who specializes in environmental law and economics.

Syracuse is one of the nation’s poorest cities, and its poorest neighborhoods are the ones most impacted by lead exposure. Driesen said that the costs of remediating a lead-exposed home and accessing necessary medical resources are “well beyond the means of almost all tenants and many landlords.”

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The United States has struggled for decades to fund fundamental infrastructural development. This has led to not only stagnating improvements but, in many cities, the precipitous decay of crucial public resources. Newark, New Jersey and Flint, Michigan, have notorious water problems. Across the nation, public transportation is often unreliable, unsafe and inaccessible.

These issues end up disproportionately harming the poorest communities in our nation, largely because wealthier Americans are equipped to buy out of these problems. But not every American family can solve the problem of unsafe drinking water by buying clean drinking water, the problem of unreliable transportation by buying their own transportation or the problem of lead exposure by investing in expensive repairs or an expensive new home.

Instead, those from poor communities are stuck, beholden to a government that often isn’t able or willing to help them access their most basic needs, a government that explains away this lack of funding with the fact that issues like these aren’t politically sexy, that they bore people who don’t have to care about them and easily frustrate people who will have to pay to solve them.

Infrastructure projects — especially those that are long term — often require unpopular tax increases, but that might be necessary to prevent the costs that come down the road when cities ignore failing infrastructure.

“Our taxes are the lowest in the developed world. And they need to go up. A lot,” Driesen said. “You just can’t let the bridges crumble and the water systems deteriorate forever. It’s not going to work. It’s not going to produce an economically productive society.”

It’s a hard sell in a country where securing funding for public projects is a hard fought and often lost battle. But fixing our national infrastructure problem needs to extend beyond quick fixes and patchwork.

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“The way we did this under the Clean Water Act is that tax revenues were higher then, and we spent a lot of revenue on building waste water treatment,” Driesen said. “What’s happened is all of this infrastructure is aging and dying. There’s a need for another mass investment like this, and it’s a pretty critical need.”

A considerable number of Americans support substantial infrastructure spending. Sixty-four percent of Americans agreed with Trump’s proposal to enact a $1 trillion program to improve U.S. infrastructure in March 2017. A year earlier, 75% said they supported spending more federal money to improve infrastructure.

Politicians on the state and local level need to impress upon their constituents the urgency of this spending. Spending money is never popular, but infrastructure is more than an expenditure. It’s an investment in the country.

The benefits of strong national infrastructure are myriad. Health care costs go down when citizens aren’t being exposed to toxins in their home and in their drinking water. Access to reliable public transportation ensures low-income Americans can work, decreasing the need for public assistance.

Until our larger state and federal government administrations prioritize infrastructure development — because it is important and pressing and the definition of what they are obligated to do — the nation will continue to bear the burden of a population abandoned.

Syracuse is like so many impoverished cities across the nation, straddled with fundamental infrastructure issues, but it can’t stand alone in its quest for solutions. It is time for a national reinvestment in our infrastructure because it is a reinvestment in our health, our economy and our future.

Sydney Gold is a freshman policy studies and public relations major. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at segold@syr.edu. She can be followed on Twitter @Sydney_Eden.

Published on October 21, 2019 at 10:48 pm