The dead weight of prodigal spending

The economic crisis has exposed not only the impossibility of sustaining many of the regional and municipal infrastructures built during the years of euphoria, but also their sheer uselessness. Huge public works such as the airports of Castellón and Ciudad Real, Seville's Olympic Stadium and the City of Culture at Santiago de Compostela, as well as most of the regional television channels and many other projects, have all become dead weights for the budgets of the various regional administrations.

The volume of investment in these projects has been so high that in normal circumstances a prompt abandonment would be indicated, pending a reactivation of the economy, when some functional value might be recovered. But their more than doubtful usefulness makes it unfeasible to tie up ever-shrinking resources in their maintenance.

A considerable number of the infrastructures over which the specter of abandonment and ruin now hangs were never really viable even at the time when they were conceived; and yet they were approved, financed and carried through to completion with the support of regional and municipal governments. Behind these lengthy chains of errors lies a wrongheaded outlook that goes a long way to explaining the flippancy with which these public administrations often acted in the years previous to the crisis. The consequences are going to remain as an economic burden for many years to come.

The spirit of enterprise was routinely confused with willful, wishful thinking, aggravated by the fact that it was far from disinterested. Behind each gargantuan building scheme lay profits proportionate to its size, which went into private pockets.

The proliferation of infrastructures of dubious or zero worth is an eloquent illustration of the aberrant economic model for which the public sector opted in Spain, perhaps without full awareness of the fact. Rather than investments that might play some potential role in modernizing the economy, these infrastructures that now litter the land like beached whales were a very thinly veiled extension of the general, speculative culture of land development. They also embodied a conception of the regional and municipal government system that proliferated amid the euphoria nourished by the development bubble: each region, even each province, had to possess every class of service for reasons of prestige, not in function of its utility.

The most obvious and illustrative case is that of the regional airports and television channels. But the same might be said of local sports centers, recreational complexes and facilities of a similar nature, which sprang up like mushrooms from one end of the country to the other.