Blandin on Broadband

An article in US News & World Report caught my eye yesterday – To Jolt Economy, Obama and Congress Eye Billions in Infrastructure Spending.

It talks about President-Elect Obama’s goal to add 2.5 million jobs in two years. It talks about how once place pegged for jobs in the Chicago train system, which is apparently a mess to the point of being a bottleneck for the whole Midwest. It talks about Minnesota’s own Representative Jim Oberstar, who a $45 billion proposal called “Rebuild America” to fix roads, bridges, airports, railways, transit systems, and wastewater treatment facilities. In fact it would cover 100 percent of the cost of projects including resurfacing highways, repairing runways, cleaning up brownfields, and sprucing up the National Zoo in Washington.

Here are the numbers bandied about for those projects:

• highways and bridges ($18.25 billion)
• environmental infrastructure ($9 billion)
• transit ($6.5 billion), the Army Corps of Engineers ($5 billion)
• federal buildings ($2.5 billion)
• rail ($2 billion)
• aviation ($1 billion)

The article talked about the fact that projects that are ready to go in the first 90 to 120 days of Obama’s administration will be in great shape for receiving those funds.

It didn’t mention broadband.

But I bet they could make the connection. I was at a rally in Hibbing in October. Oberstar was one of the speakers (with Hillary Clinton, Senator Klobuchar and others). He talked about plans to rebuild the roads – and I think he may have mentioned broadband then. I know others made that connection. Maybe we need to get ready to get Minnesota in line to be one of those first quarter projects.