Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is running for re-election this year in a contest that may as well be called "Snow White vs. The Seven Dwarfs". Her victory is as predictable as the potholes that reveal themselves each year when the winter ice sheet recedes.
While Whitmer's first term was considerably derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, she ran in 2018 on a rather simple message, meant to appeal to everyone: "Fix the Damn Roads." She might as well run on that platform again, since the roads have most certainly not been fixed, at least not where I live.
While Kalamazoo itself is a joke, as cities go, poor road conditions in general are not. In India, for example, potholes are responsible for the deaths of 10 people per day. Michigan's motorists are more likely to pay with their savings accounts than with their lives, as their car suspension parts snap and buckle under the strain of unnecessary roughness.
So we don't invest in the roads here. Call it the Other Kalamazoo Promise: You will be replacing your tires, rims, shocks, struts, springs, ball joints, tie rod ends, wheel bearings and other parts on your vehicle on a regular basis if you choose to live or work here.
Is it somehow super-expensive to patch potholes? No... About $40 or $50 for the patching material, plus a couple of guys and a truck. Repaving the roads would be a much better solution, of course, and that costs anywhere between $300,000 and $900,000 per mile, depending on width and other physical factors.
So why wouldn't the city and the county want to invest in our infrastructure, even if the State government won't keep its word to do so? I guess we have other things to spend our money on around here. Lord knows we don't raise enough in taxes - if we did, we wouldn't have a bunch of billionaire patrons stocking the larder like we do (something very few, if any, other cities have ever done).
One of the projects that the wealthy have brought to our town is called WMed. If you have read this blog even a few times, you know that WMed has contracts with nearly all the counties in Southwest Michigan and beyond to perform coroner services. They perform about 1,000 autopsies each year here, at a cost of about $3,300 per corpse.
If you cheated and used a calculator, you know that comes up to about $3.3 million per year. That's enough money to patch hundreds of thousands of potholes, or to pave between 3 and 10 miles of road each year. So why are our roads so much worse than our neighboring city of Portage?
Perhaps we have other priorities here. Perhaps the county is too busy fending off lawsuits - from citizens and former employees alike - to budget its resources sensibly.
Or maybe they just don't care.
It's kind of easy for me to believe the latter, seeing the way WMed's Chief Pathologist, Joyce deJong, lied her ass off on my nephew Charlie's death certificate. Even after she changed her story, she still refused to change the document!
If I lie to my boss, I get fired. If you lie to your boss, you get fired. But the Medical Examiner in Kalamazoo gets paid whether she chooses to be honest or not and her salary alone could pave, what, another quarter- to half-mile of road. Depending on width. And other physical factors.
Nothing changes here. No matter what promises are made or who is supposed to keep them, nothing gets put right. Not the coroner, not the roads, not the parasitic clowns who live off our consent to be governed. You can think about this stuff the next time you're waiting for your car to be repaired... I tend to think about it a little more often than that.
pH 2.23.22
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