Infrastructure On Our Inland Waterways

Fortune profiles barge transportation on the Mississippi River system.  Amongst the details is a story of a construction project gone horribly awry, the Olmstead Lock and Dam project:

The Olmsted Locks and Dam will replace two ancient and deteriorating locks and dams, known simply as 52 and 53, that sit just below Paducah near the end of the Ohio River. This is a chokepoint -- about 13% of all river cargo passes through here. The construction site at Olmsted swarms with workers tending to an enormous gantry crane that can lift 5,000-ton concrete forms. In the river is a $30 million catamaran that floats the forms into place to create the new dam. Most such projects involve diverting the water before building the dam. That was the original idea for Olmsted in 1988. Then engineers convinced the Corps that it might be better and cheaper to build in the wet, with the river still flowing. That had never been done on such a large scale. Twenty-three years later there are locks but no dam, and the cost has jumped from $775 million to $2.1 billion and is still rising. Two-thirds of the increase is due to design changes. The other third is from inefficiencies, most notably the restrictions on multiyear commitments to funding, which drive up contractor uncertainty and costs for materials. "People want to know, 'Do you have a handle on this?' " says David Dale, a deputy district engineer in the Corps' Louisville District, whose portfolio includes Olmsted. "We believe we do, because we've expended a lot of time on management control and on doing the assessments on how much it's going to cost, and we're getting closer to the point of releasing that number."
Since the mid-1980s, the industry has paid half the cost of construction into a trust fund through a fuel tax, now at 20¢ a gallon. For years the arrangement helped build new locks and refurbish old ones. Olmsted changed that. The balance in the fund, once more than $400 million, has been nearly wiped out. The money coming in -- about $80 million annually -- can pay for this one project and almost nothing else, pushing back some other needed projects for decades. Last year river haulers proposed what they thought to be a grand bargain. They would pay more in fuel taxes in exchange for improvements in the management of these big projects and for limiting the trust fund to building locks but not dams (the idea being that lots of people benefit from the lakes created by the dams). They have gotten nowhere. The administration's most recent proposal supports getting more revenue from lock fees but doesn't want significant changes in construction methods or funding responsibilities. And the Republicans don't want anybody's taxes going up.
Big federal river projects are easy targets on either side of the political aisle. Fiscal hawks hate the spending. Environmentalists hate the effects on ecosystems and all that burning coal. "This time, with the overwhelming debt that the country is accruing, they've decided to attack on both levels," says Mike Toohey, the president of the Waterways Council, an industry lobbying group. His first goal: to persuade the Republican leadership that his members helped elect that the higher gas tax the industry wants is less a tax and more a user fee.
"How can you continue to rely on a system that was built in the '20s and '30s and expect it to continue to perform way after its design life to keep the economy moving?" Toohey asks. "It just isn't going to happen without investment."

Wow, that is a bad performance for an engineering consultant.  When I say bad, I mean total clusterf&^$.  So when Democrats proposed taxes on corporations, Republicans reply that those taxes will get passed on to consumers, so it just isn't worth doing.  Well doesn't the same thing happen here.  If the government doesn't spend the money to improve the transportation system, won't consumers just end up paying more for their stuff?  Why not spend money to make the system more efficient, with an actual return on investment?  I really get the feeling that most Republican politicians were actually fairly dumb businessmen.