Mayor Pete’s Very Big Pothole

Buttigieg has an opportunity to make America work again

This is Pete Buttigieg’s moment. At a time when nothing seems to work or get done in America, he has a chance to change the narrative.

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore this week was a shocking event. Partly because the wide-lens video captured every inch of the tanker-bridge collision — a made-for-Tik Tok moment — but mostly because it showed us how a single, random event can destroy an economic pillar of a city in a few short seconds. It was Baltimore’s black swan.

It was shocking even though we’re now used to things falling apart in America. The border doesn’t work anymore. Boeing airplanes, where doors are sometimes installed with Dawn detergent instead of industrial adhesive, are falling apart. AT&T left millions of users without service last month due to “technical errors.” Petty criminals roam free in our big cities. A gang of cyberpunks can hold huge businesses hostage with a few keystrokes.

The collapse of the Key Bridge seemed to capture America’s debilitation in a moment. The cause of the accident is still unclear, but early indications are that it could have been due to contaminated fuel that choked the system and created a power outage onboard the Dali, disabling the ship’s controls. Which begs the question: how many other ships are out there running on contaminated fuel?

The investigation and the wave of litigation that will follow are going to take a very long time to resolve. But the repair of the bridge can’t.

For the Secretary of Transportation, this is more than a bridge repair. It’s a moment. At a time when America doesn’t seem to be working very well, Mayor Pete has an opportunity to demonstrate otherwise.

It’s fitting that this moment presented itself to a former mayor. As Anthony Villaraigosa showed us while he was running the city of Los Angeles, one of the fundamental responsibilities of a mayor is to fix things, including potholes. He took great pride in bragging to the press about how many potholes his administration had filled. Rudy Giuliani is now just a sad specter of a man, but at his peak in the 1990s he used the “broken windows” strategy to fight crime and showed New Yorkers the city could work again.

The collapse of the Key Bridge is a huge pothole in American infrastructure and its quick reconstruction is suddenly Job 1 for Buttigiege.

It’s a daunting task. The original Key Bridge took five years to build in the 1970s. It took seven years to rebuild the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay, which collapsed after being struck by a freighter in 1980. Infrastructure takes time. But the timeline can be accelerated with the right leadership.

An effort to rebuild a collapsed section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia in 2023 was originally expected to take months. Instead, it took 12 days in part because officials were able to speed up the bureaucracy, including fast-tracking the permitting process after Gov. Josh Shapiro signed a disaster declaration within 24 hours after the collapse. When a 1994 earthquake destroyed a big section of freeway in Los Angeles, CalTrans and construction company C.C. Meyers rebuilt it in just a few months, 74 days ahead of schedule.

Mayor Pete should show the same kind of urgency. He should declare a “diamond lane” for reconstruction of the bridge.

As Andy Winkler, director of the housing and infrastructure project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told the Washington Post, state and federal emergency declarations could help speed the rebuilding process by waiving rules and regulations around competitive bidding and other restrictions that can sometimes slow large infrastructure projects. Buttigieg could take that a step further by declaring the rebuild of the Key Bridge as a test case for how to accelerate infrastructure projects around the country, particularly rehabilitation and expansion of the power grid.

If Buttigieg has aspirations for higher office in 2028, which he surely does, now is his moment. It’s his moment to show Americans he has the fortitude to cut through the administrative state and get things done, to favor pragmatism over politics, and to find a way to make America work again. In doing so, he might be able to restore a measure of trust in the institution of government, which it desperately needs right now.

C’mon Mayor Pete, let’s fill that pothole. We’re rooting for you.