We shouldn't pay for Chicago's boondoggle

By CHARLES M. ARLINGHAUS

If the mayor of the city of Chicago wants to waste $20 billion on his airport, it shouldn't matter to the people of New Hampshire. Unfortunately, what happens in Chicago affects whether our roads are repaved and our bridges are rebuilt.

Political power determines which giant piece of public works excess we get to watch in any given decade. Granite Staters have had a ringside seat for watching one of the biggest boondoggles in American history. The good people of Boston decided that their city would be much prettier if they could take the Central Artery and put it in a tunnel so we didn't have to look at the ugly elevated highway.

It would look a lot nicer, but it was really expensive to do. The taxpayers of Boston didn't want to put up the money, and neither did the taxpayers of the whole state. Who could blame them? It would cost billions of dollars that wouldn't then be available for other, more pressing needs. Then good news for them came from Tip O'Neill.

O'Neill was the legendary speaker of U.S. House of Representatives at the time. He was a Bostonian and famously said "all politics is local." The wishes for a prettier Boston could be fulfilled if he could tap into his power and have the whole country, instead of the locals, foot the bill. The project wasn't important enough for locals to decide to do it, but federal money is free money, so what the heck?

What became known as the Big Dig ended up officially named the Tip O'Neill Tunnel. It was estimated to cost $3 billion when it started, but it will cost $22 billion when all is said and done.

Because O'Neill was so powerful, your gas taxes and mine flooded Boston. That's the same reason we almost had a Bridge to Nowhere two years ago. Republican Sen. Ted Stevens was the powerful chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. As long as he was in charge, there was no need for states to be sent money according to their population or number of road miles. No, the right formula was more money for me because I'm in charge.

The bridge was stopped and Sen. Stevens was bounced from office for corruption a few months ago, but not before he showered his home state with our money.

Coming along this year is a boondoggle to make the Big Dig look medium-sized. Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley has the largest airport in the world, Chicago's O'Hare. He wants to spend an estimated $20 billion to build another terminal and runways and eliminate a small town in the area, generally "improving" the airport.

There is nothing wrong with that as far I'm concerned. Some mayor wants to make changes to his airport, that's his problem. I'm not going to tell Chicago what to do anymore than I complained to Mayor Frank Guinta when the Manchester airport cut its budget last week.

The difficulty is that Mayor Daley doesn't want to run his airport by himself. He doesn't have the $20 billion he wants to spend. He doesn't want to raise taxes to get it. The airlines don't think the airport needs the changes, and the state of Illinois won't pony up the cash. So what's a poor mayor to do? He wants you and me to pay for a project that isn't important enough for his own state to fund.

The airport boondoggle looks like a really bad idea. But I shouldn't care. If Illinois wants to do something stupid, what's it to me? I live in New Hampshire. If we took the transportation money the federal government wants to give us back and just divided it up by population and road miles (there is actually a formula), no one would get extra because his senator was more powerful than someone else's. More importantly, decisions about what's important in Illinois would be made by people in Illinois, and you and I wouldn't have to have an opinion.

In New Hampshire, we do a better job of this than most states do. Money transfers from the state government to local governments are done by formula. The millions in revenue sharing are sent by formula, mostly per capita, regardless of who happens to be Senate president or House speaker. The governor can't help Hopkinton. It gets what it gets.

We should be careful with our own stimulus money so that we don't end up picking winners and losers. When they do it at the federal level, we're all losers unless we have a really big airport or the speaker of the House lives nearby.

Charles M. Arlinghaus is president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in Concord.