From Good Intentions to Common Corruption

By Suzanne Wu on March 24, 2009 7:33 AM

As the Obama administration prepares to disperse economic stimulus money for infrastructure, a timely new book sheds light on special districts - the “shadow governments” that will be responsible for spending a large portion of these funds.

“What really captured my interest was the enormous scale of some of the public works projects undertaken by special districts,” said Louise Nelson Dyble, associate director for research at the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development.

Specifically, Dyble traced the history of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District as a case study of high-stakes infrastructure development.

Despite the fame of the iconic bridge that it was created to finance and manage, “the bridge district was far from unusual,” Dyble explained. “Its history is important because it was a typical special district - neither its size, jurisdiction, nor resources were out of the ordinary.”

In her new book Paying the Toll (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), Dyble documented how the bridge district grew from well-intentioned public corporation with bipartisan support to notorious organization rife with corruption.

“American metropolitan areas, especially in the West, are much more decentralized and fragmented than metropolitan areas in other places,” Dyble said. “The Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, in its efforts to stave off outside authority, helped maintain and perpetuate the fragmented structure of government that really has had a lasting effect on how metropolitans areas are now.”

According to Dyble, a large portion of bridge toll revenue went to lobbying, including a major campaign to stop rapid transit, which might cut into toll profits. It also went to fund lavish parties, tours of Europe and a fleet of Cadillacs for Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District officials.

“I want to call a spade a spade,” Dyble said. “Special districts undermine democracy - they were designed to remove the decision-making process from public scrutiny and participation for the sake of expediency and efficiency.”

The Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District initially denied Dyble’s request to access its archives: “They told me to go away. Of course, I took that as a challenge,” Dyble said, noting that a sense of pride in the bridge as an iconic landmark may have led bridge officials to preserve even incriminating documents.

After a prolonged legal battle, Dyble eventually was permitted to sift through more than 300 boxes of material that had never been examined before by historians.

“No one likes corruption. There’s disagreement on where it comes from, but part of fixing it is making sure that there’s transparency and accountability for organizations, whether public or private,” Dyble said.

Special districts - including such well-known agencies as New York’s Port Authority and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California - comprised the fastest-growing sector of local government in the 20th century, according to Dyble.

“Their history reveals so much about how bureaucratic power works,” Dyble said. “We might be entering a new era of large-scale infrastructure development very soon, and we need to make sure there’s accountability and responsibility in its management.”

The Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District expanded into buses and ferries in the 1970s, thereby ensuring its survival to the present day. The toll on the Golden Gate Bridge was last raised in September 2008.

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