Oops! Obama touts Jobs Bill at bridge that won’t qualify. Workers would not have been hired until 2015.
LA TIMES: You know all those rusting bridges that President Obama wants to spend billions more dollars repairing to allegedly stimulate the economy?
He’s headed out to one today which he’s described as a “bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that’s on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America.” It is on a busy trucking route, spanning the Ohio River between Covington, Ky., and Cincinnati.
It’s the Brent Spence Bridge. It doesn’t really need repairs. It’s got decades of good life left in its steel spans. It’s just overloaded. The bridge was built to handle 85,000 cars and trucks a day, which seemed like a lot back during construction in the Nixon era.
Oh, the incompetence
CINCINATI.COM: A presidential visit is a big deal, but will it actually guarantee funding for the aged and overused Brent Spence Bridge?
Not really, say transportation experts and highway officials.
That’s not how highway funding works. When you consider the partisan bickering over the president’s jobs bill and the stalled federal transportation bill, the bridge looks no closer to getting the $2.4 billion needed to replace it than before it caught the White House’s attention.
First, there’s the president’s jobs bill, which is the reason for his trip. In his joint address to Congress on Sept. 8, Obama called on Congress to immediately pass his plan. But the bill has received a lukewarm reception on the Hill, where even Democrats haven’t rallied around it.
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