Stimulus dollars go to reconstruct the Caldecott Tunnel

As stimulus money from Washington flows into the state, it’s lifting a few big public works that had run aground when California ran out of money.

One of those projects is an expansion of the East Bay's Caldecott Tunnel. It was first constructed during the Great Depression with money from FDR'S New Deal. And Friday, work is supposed to begin on a new bore through the hills.

KALW’s Nathanael Johnson went to the Caldecott Tunnel and has this report.

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NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I’m standing here at the site where construction will begin tomorrow. It’s a project that’s been made possible by Obama’s stimulus package. The federal government is kicking in almost $200 million for this new bore of the Caldecott Tunnel – and you can hear the cars wooshing by in the rain. 

There’s no gridlock right now, but the point of this is to ease congestion. And as I stand here, it’s impossible not to think back on history because the original tunnel was a project of FDR’s New Deal back in the depths of the Depression, and right now I’m looking – I’m standing - immediately above the road as the cars go into the tunnel and I’m looking at this beautiful façade.

I’ve never really seen it before but there’s this beautiful art-deco concrete façade that, if you’re not totally focused on the bumper in front of you, you’ll see over the portal of the tunnel.  In that portal there are all the fans and blowers that keep the air pure. Those were made in the 1930's, and all of those moving parts have remained - with maintenance – to this day.

Edward Coppin is a supervisor here, and he’s going to show me what they look like.

COPPIN: Well this must be a sight for you huh? These are the exhaustive, they suck the bad air out and blow it up.

JOHNSON: Oh yeah, I had no idea! And these are huge!  What, two stories?

COPPIN: More than that, maybe about 50 feet.

JOHNSON: They are very big and there are four of these, exhausters?

COPPIN: Yes there are two exhausters and two blowers for each tunnel, bore one and two. Almost exclusively all of these nuts and bolts and everything you see, were installed in 1937.

COPPIN: you can see these that look just like big boxes? That’s part of the air duct there. They suck in air from the building … through that duct and - can you stoop really low?

JOHNSON: Yeah – should I stoop through?

COPPIN: There’s a lot of wind in here because the fan's on! There’s the duct.  It pushes the air in here and you see it goes down the side? It goes down the side of the tunnel and comes out the louvers you see just below your window when you are driving though – that’s where the air comes in. Think we can get out of here, it’s cold!

JOHNSON: So the new Deal projects have proved their lasting value, but in the 30s a lot of people were worried about how the money was being used, and which projects were being done. And now with a new recession and a new stimulus package, people are beginning to ask the same questions. Are these the right projects? And is the money being used as effectively as it could be?

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HOST: And Nate is back with us now in the studio. In some ways, we are living in similar times to the 30s, when the original tunnel was constructed. What did you find when you began to compare and contrast?

JOHNSON: There are parallels between that time and this. Historians call that the great era of public works.  Engineers were building the Caldecott Tunnel, the Bay Bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge. We are in a similar era now, but something fundamental has changed: the projects are much more modest. We are just building half a Bay Bridge, just one bore of the Caldecott Tunnel.

HOST: And so when you looked at the costs, then versus now, what did you find? Who is getting a better deal, Barack Obama or Franklin Roosevelt?

JOHNSON: This new tunnel is going to cost 420 million dollars. And you hear these big numbers in the news all the time and I’ll admit, I really never have any idea how big they are. But it helps if you have a comparison like this. If you adjust for inflation, the original tunnels, cost about 80 million, which means that the new tunnel is costing us 5 times as much as the old one.

HOST: Wow, 5 times more expensive? What are we paying for now that they weren’t then?

JOHNSON: The biggest thing has to be the cost of labor. Back then, people didn’t make as much, even relative to the things they’d buy, like food. The amount of goods a surveyor can buy with his salary today versus during the Great Depression has more than tripled. So when I controlled for the increase in salaries, the price tag on the original tunnel went up to 180 million dollars - for the two bores – versus 420 million for just one bore today.

HOST: So where’s the rest of the money going?

JOHNSON: Some of it is going for environmental regulations, they really didn’t have those back in the 30s, and they aren’t cheap. The historians I’ve been talking to point out that health care is creating a huge burden.  The costs are extreme now, and back then the health care cost was zero. But all that is a little fuzzy, so I asked an economist at the University of Illinois, a guy named Samuel H. Williamson, and he has made this website -- Measuring Growth -- to do exactly this kind of comparison. And he suggested just turning it around and asking, what percentage of the nation’s economy is going into this? And when you look at it that way, the costs then and now are about the same.  That captures all the things like health care and environmental regulations.

HOST: So which measure is the best? Is this a good deal or not?

JOHNSON: It’s not a great deal, but it’s not a rip off: it doesn’t look like money is being wasted. You can quibble with the choice of projects – you know we are supposed to be reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and some would argue that investing all this money in highways will encourage people to drive – and I’ll be looking into that furtherI’ll also be looking at the details of how this Caldecott Tunnel money is spent and trying to figure out how many jobs it’s creating.