Three years ago, Atlantic City’s mayor applied for and received a $10.3 federal grant to repave 2.7 miles of Atlantic Avenue. To get this money, the city agreed to give Atlantic Avenue a “road diet” approved by President Biden’s “woke” Department of Transportation. It had to cut traffic from two lanes in each direction to one. It also had to add bike baths.
Click Here For Link To Full Post: ATLANTIC AVENUE, ATLANTIC CITY: Planning for Safer Conditions for All Roadway Users – NJDOT Technology Transfer
During the past three years, the nearby beach towns of Margate and Ocean City, New Jersey applied for and received the same federal grant. They also agreed to change their main street from two lanes in each direction to one lane. They also agreed to add bike paths. They got that money and repaved the main street in each town–Atlantic Avenue in Margate. West Avenue in Ocean City.
Biden Democrats wanted traffic jams as part of their “Green New Deal”. They want to discourage people from using automobiles.
Atlantic City did not get its money. Its city council and casinos objected to the “road diet” and filed a lawsuit to stop it . Changing Atlantic Avenue to one lane in each direction would cause dangerous traffic jams, hurt the casino and hotel businesses, and block emergency traffic.
Atlantic Avenue is the most important street in Atlantic City. Cars and buses use it to bring tourists and employees to and from the resort’s famous Boardwalk and casino hotels. Trucks use it to bring food to its restaurants and merchandise to its shops.
For years, the surface of Atlantic Avenue has been uneven and dangerous to cars and pedestrians. It is uneven and filled with many cracks, patches and potholes. It looks like a street in a third world country.
This week, Republican Congressman Jeff Van Drew announced that President Trump’s Department of Transportation Department would spend $10.3 million to repave Atlantic Avenue without requiring the “road diet” demanded by Biden Democrats.
However, this is not a happy ending. The federal government is broke. The spending is unconstitutional.
The federal government is $36 trillion in debt. It is spending a trillion dollars more than it collects in taxes each year. In 1960, the silver in a U.S. silver dollar was worth one dollar. Today it worth $27. The silver did not gain value. Today’s dollar is worth only 4% of what it was worth in 1960. That is why we have inflation.
The federal government is broke and ruining the dollar because it is spending money on local projects. The U.S. Constitution was designed to give our national government power to address national issues that could not be done by state and local governments.
Article I Section 8 of our Constitution describes them. They include regulating commerce between states and foreign nations, issuing money, delivering mail, having patents and copyrights to protect inventors and authors. They also include maintaining a military to defend the country.
Atlantic Avenue in Atlantic City is a 2.7 mile dead-end street. It has nothing to do with interstate or international commerce. The federal government has no power to spend money on it.
For years, every town in New Jersey easily paved its own streets with local property taxes. This was the fairest and most efficient way to pay for them.
Every house and business is more valuable when the streets of a town are paved. Property taxes are like condominium association fees. The owner of every condominium apartment pays a share of the cost of repairing or replacing the roof, elevator and heating and air conditioning when they wear out.
Everything changed during the 1960s. New federal and state laws made it much more expensive for local governments to operate, build and or repair everything. They forced towns and counties to spend much more money on salaries, pensions and benefits for their employees. They forced local governments to comply with complicated new laws and to pay more for insurance, lawyers, lawsuits and trash disposal.
All of this forced New Jersey towns to raise real estate taxes. Most voters opposed higher property taxes. However, they did not oppose more spending.
They instead voted for candidates who promised to make “somebody else” pay for the higher spending.
Since the mid-1960s, most voters in New Jersey supported politicians who gave them new state sales, income, and gasoline taxes to pay for local public schools and town and county governments. They also politicians who supported massive borrowing by all levels of government to pay for the higher costs of local governments and public schools.
Now we have local governments that can no longer pay to pave their own streets. We also now have federal and state governments that are also overtaxed and deeply in debt.
We need to make some hard and painful choices.
This is not just a problem in Atlantic City.
Every year, we have massive traffic jams and deadly crashes around Route 347 in Cape May County because we never finished Route 55 as a four-lane divided highway.
We are catching and releasing violent juvenile criminals because we are not building and staffing youth detention centers to keep them away from society.
We have hundreds of mentally ill, drug-addicted, and intoxicated “homeless” wandering the Boardwalk and streets of Atlantic City because we have no money for state mental hospitals to house them.
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