In comparison, Gov. Steve Bullock may seem like a piker, who estimated in April 2016 his package for roads, schools, Romney Gym (at Montana State University in Bozeman), impacted communities, and a veteran’s home in Butte would cost only $200 million. This, though, can viewed as a mere toe in the door for the Society of Civil Engineers’ desire that Montana tackle a maintenance backlog of $30 billion, 150 times the size of Bullock’s current ambitions. While the Bullock plan requires $400 from each taxpayer, it's plain to see that it's just a warm-up and that people should brace for perpetual and escalating demands.

But such wide popularity prompts some off-the-bandwagon thinking, some contrarian sobriety. Consider basic questions: What is infrastructure and why is it important? Whose responsibility is it to pay? What’s the fairest way to allocate state funds for it? Can spending go awry?

Infrastructure includes roads, bridges, ports, airports, sewer, water and electric systems, pipelines. It’s important because it can, properly done, facilitate economic development and prosperity.

If infrastructure's benefits are broadly distributed, its costs should be generally borne by all in society through taxes. But infrastructure that primarily benefits a particular city should be funded by people of that city.

Infrastructure projects presented to the Legislature in recent sessions have been mostly for local needs, with few even remotely of statewide importance. Local needs should be funded by localities. Elevating the arena of discussion from the locality to the state Legislature invites cronyism and political chicanery; the state budget becomes a big piñata, subject to sleazy pork-barreling. Favors can be traded and principled legislators penalized. Cities vie for top ranking, clawing for more than their share of the tax haul, like magpies around a carcass.

Discussions about what can be afforded are so much more real at a city council meeting than at the Legislature. Redistribution is inevitable when the funding allocation process goes up one level from where it should be decided. Some towns come out with more than the taxes extracted from their people, some come out with less. 

One of the projects considered in the 2015 legislature was a library renovation at MSU-Billings costing over $1 million. One of us walked through that library a few months ago, mid-week, mid-semester, mid-day, during weather cool enough to discourage outside gatherings and study. On one of the main floors, covering 22,000 square feet, only three students were present while six staff members dawdled. Throughout the state, many college buildings get little use due to over-building and falling enrollments.

Waste is reason enough to worry about the infrastructure-spending bandwagon, but the most salient objection is about redistribution, with its inevitable cost shifts. Projects should be funded by those who need them and benefit from them, not loaded upon people in other localities via the Legislature’s taxing and spending authority.

In short, the fervor for infrastructure merits healthy skepticism.