By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The ongoing raging COVID-19 community transmission that is expanding, like this year’s wildfires and tropical storms, will continue to impact children beyond this season. It is not over yet for them. Nor will it end for them. Children’s lives, like the lives of adults, are being damaged in many ways. But children have much less experience to return to. Adults have memory and lived perspectives.
By Fred Palm, contributing editor | Our South Carolina emergency plan is an all-event skeleton. Depending upon the particular threat, customization to the plan is made. Even in the overall skeleton plan, any epidemic event is a second thought found in an appendix (14-1) to the general model for action. In these plans, there is no pandemic appendix, so with COVID-19, we presumptively start as if the virus is an infection.
An epidemic requires a swift model that leaps ahead of the presenting of requests for medical services. State-level authorizations and equipment requests passed up the line will not be delivered in time. In fact, little time exists if an infection doubles every five days.
Social science surveys estimate the size of something, the incidence in the population. In this election season, for example, we are bombarded with polling data about what percentage of voters, likely Republicans or Democrats, are expected to behave in a particular way.
By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The S.C. Department of Transportation (SCDOT) proposes to widen Interstate 526 and redo the Interstate 26 intersection. This will be a massive redo of a major travel vector. The cost: at least $1.1 billion. The I-526 Corridor Analysis shows minor shifts in congestion or capacity improvement. The SCDOT website is open to the end of January for our comments.
SCDOT builds highways and wants us to focus on the four alternative highway routes. We are putting down our future regional investments and growth. Highway investment drives other future investments. Businesses use interstate distribution of their goods that grows our economy. Build it and they will come or follow. In a similar vein, railroad spines drove our country’s western development.
Transportation, flooding and economic factors drive the following decisions: Where homes get put; where business expands; and how long the commute follows. These are supporting, opposing, or conflicting factors.
* CLICK into the story to find how too take part in the SCDOT virtual public meeting and share your voice.
By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The S.C. Department of Transportation (SCDOT) wants to widen Interstate 526 to six lanes in Charleston and Berkeley counties recognizing that congestion is regional and the correct response is more highway.
Maybe.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way into the commercial, medical and educational spheres. Traffic management involves dynamic conditions involving both complex and repetitive decisions to control traffic signals to get us through an intersection.
Congestion detection and prediction is a math problem that we can do — and so can trained machines. In fact, the Federal Highway Administration advocates more use of these “Adaptive Traffic Management Systems.”
By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The role of a government inspector general is much in the news lately. The position has evolved from military tradition to ensure that government-funded entities use taxpayer money in careful, frugal and legal manners. We don’t want, for example, our hard-earned tax dollars wasted, ripped-off, squandered, thieved or frauded.
The inspector general was first used here during our Revolutionary War. General George Washington smartly recognized that his militia leaders and those that reported to them sometimes distorted, exaggerated and plain lied about their fitness and capabilities.
Washington appointed an inspector general modeling a practice of the Prussian Army, then the world’s elite war-fighting army. Back then, one of the practices of the Prussian Army was to require field inspections for war-fighting fitness to be conducted by knowledgeable staff who were independent and outside the reporting chain of command. They were intentionally free from the obligation to follow orders.
Washington and his command staff used an inspector general to provide a potential pathway for the truth. The obligation of Washington’s inspectional forces was to objectively determine capability and to accurately report on the conditions …
By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The City of Charleston is required to identify severely flood-damaged properties so that if the damage is extensive, the properties are removed from the floodplain and, if not, they are brought up to a higher level of resilience to better survive the next flood event.
This is a long-term, common-sense strategy to correct past planning and building decisions that did not work with increases in flood events and to lessen the replacement cost borne by all taxpayers. This also is a “common good” policy offering transition. Carried out over decades, owners are to be compensated for their losses, at-risk housing is removed from the floodplain, and we get to live in a more resilient community.
Unfortunately, the sensible policy is not being done well enough and treated more on a par with sloppy housekeeping by the city. …
By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The S.C. Joint Bond Review Committee last week sent Charleston County’s funding application to extend Interstate 526 to a four-person subcommittee to provide the due diligence of the facts of the financing. Why? Because years of skittish details about the project just do not fly.
Core issue: The basic problem that caused the delay by the Joint Bond Review Committee is found in the half-truths, equivocations, shell games, bait and switch, balderdash and peekaboo funding sources draped with inchoate statements about other displaced projects from the majority of Charleston County Council that backs the I-526 extension (I-526X). Through proposed no-see-em fiscal sleights of hand, the council’s Majority of Five offers to push through this incredibly expensive highway with zero contingency built off of a well-founded cost estimate because at its root, the extension is unjustifiable.
By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The S.C. State Infrastructure Bank (SIB) last week voted no (4-3) again on continuing the contract for completing the I-526 extension (I-526X) in Charleston County. On Friday, the county threatened a lawsuit, claiming the SIB couldn’t pull out of the project that would connect West Ashley to Johns Island and end on James Island, traversing the Stono River over the adjacent swamp-wetlands.
While the final costs of this addition have not been nailed down, it would be the most expensive highway expansion ever built in South Carolina. This is a big deal.
By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The Lowcountry is a dysfunctional area because in many situations, the business community organizes “business councils” that serve as sounding boards and advocates for enlightened public policy for the common good to achieve a turnaround. Unfortunately, they’ve been mostly dormant and now is the time for our business leaders to step forward to contribute community service for the common good. Here is why.
The fiction that ‘growth is good’ and that ‘growth pays for itself’ is exposed in Summerville for the shams that they are. All elected politicians know them to be big lies. Only some have the courage to give voice to truth and the reality of numbers – and to come up with workable solutions.
By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The Post and Courier editorial team (April 27, 2018) advocated that the City of Charleston plant trees to start to address flooding. That is a start. Here is what got left out.
We know that the outer lands, when properly employed to protect ourselves, buffer, reduce inundation and wave height that flood the inner uplands. We also know the flooding follows the rivers and floodplains going inland to Goose Creek and Mount Pleasant to the Francis Marion National Forest and other parts of the lowlands. This is a threat going well beyond the city of Charleston and addressed well beyond planting trees, though it helps. It could also be a way to have the Dutch dialogue that the P&C editorial writers endorsed recently.
Flooding is a coastal threat. Comprehensive plan funding is needed by all the S.C. state coastal counties and cities; and where the lion’s share of state revenue is drawn. We urgently need the state to act by funding a statewide plan including the coastal waters’ edges and upland rivers.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina! (2019) by editor and publisher Andy Brack offers incisive commentaries on the American South, politics, the common good and interesting South Carolina leaders. Available exclusively for Kindle for $7.99. A paperback version will be ready soon. Learn more.
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