Flutterby™! : Municipal funding rant of the moment

Petaluma City Manager John Brown just sent around a note about funding Petaluma city streets. In it, he notes 3 ways in which city residents contribute to funds which pay for city roads:

1. A kickback to the city from the garbage franchise for about $1.73 out of the average $16.84 garbage bill.
2. About $.05/gallon from gasoline taxes.
3. About .5% of the local 8.25% sales tax, 0.0004125 of every purchase, so of every $2424 dollars spent, about a dolllar.

Various profligate spenders on Petaluma's city council (amusingly, the people who tend to label themselves "conservative") are proposing a $120M new crossing over (or under) 101 on the north end of town. Let's say that infrastructure costs about .6%/month (a mortgage runs about $600 per hundred thousand, and bridges last about 30 years, so a reasonable back of the envelope). So that's $720k/month in value that this project needs to bring to the city.

1. That's 416,184 new garbage customers. My guess is about ten times the current number of garbage customers.
2. That's... well... a whole hell of a lot of gallons of gasoline.
3. That's $1.7B in sales tax revenue.

Now there are two things plain here. The first is that the way we fund infrastructure is bogus. The second is that we need to stop building bullshit infrastructure until we have better models for how that infrastructure brings return, because the funding is *so* decoupled from the return that we've lost any sanity in building out new projects.