More American Recovery Act Waste

Here are some photos from downtown Bristol, TN. First, there is the huge sign with the taxpayer funded "O", to remind us that King Barry is providing us with this (let's not forget that).


Then, it is time to take a look at the project:


In short, this is a red light project. Or, as the "shovel-ready" folks like to say, an "intersection infrastructure improvement project." One photo shows the wires on the ground and the other photo shows both the old and the new red lights. As you can see from the photo, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the old red lights. They work fine. I pass through this intersection periodically and have never seen a malfunction. The new red lights are on the large black bars. You can see one of them on the upper left and another bar can be seen just behind the old red lights.

What will happen to these perfectly decent red lights that are being removed? They will likely be tossed in a landfill. Why should we remove perfectly usable infrastructure and replace it with something else, just to "make jobs" for people. This is incredibly wasteful. We don't need to be spending money to fix things that are not broken.

This isn't the second time I've seen junk like this. Last summer, I saw a perfectly fine that was being repaved. There was no reason that I could see to repave the road. It was probably at least 5 years away from needing paving.

Why does our government continue to blow money like this? And they think they know how to better spend my money than I do. Good grief.