With oversight hearings commencing to find out how Rhode Island wound up narrowly avoiding an unprecedented calamity – and instead just got stuck with an historic, exorbitantly expensive headache that won’t soon be over – following the discovery of the failing Washington Bridge, it brings to mind a few key questions about how we got to this point, and whether or not a reprioritization of priorities is in order moving forward.

Of course, figuring out how a bridge built in the late 60s so rapidly got to the point of being near critical failure should be our primary concern. Carrying hundreds of thousands of people each week, the need to understand how such a vital structure got so deficient, so quickly, is crucial to understanding how we can avoid something like this happening again in the future.

But the Washington Bridge won’t be the last time that Rhode Island’s languishing infrastructure causes budgetary woes and inconveniences for taxpayers.

Just here in Warwick, the city faces a possible $14 million hit due to its compromised sewer infrastructure; which the ratepayers will be saddled with in order to fix. There have been multiple stories in just the past couple of years regarding thousands of gallons of untreated sewage going into local waterways, closing schools, and disrupting traffic due to these types of issues.

Roads, bridges, sewers and other utilities are not exciting aspects of our society to spend taxpayer dollars on, but the lesson that continuously seems to be ignored is that ignoring the responsibility to continuously maintain these crucial components of our state will only increase the burden later on by many magnitudes more, and at the risk of lives and environmental protection in the process.

Deferred maintenance is a cost saving measure only in the short term. In the long term, it merely pushes the weight of responsibility onto future generations who did not create the problem in the first place.

When former Governor Gina Raimondo began the Rhode Works program to repair roads and bridges, it was a valiant effort to address the situation that was not caused by any one administration or person, but was contributed to by many. Of course, funding this endeavor has been its biggest hindrance.

At what point will the need to secure our infrastructure and make investments in it for our prolonged future become the top priority? At what point will deferred maintenance become politically damaging?

Hopefully, it won’t take a true catastrophe in order to see the light.