Why There Was No Basement Tornado Shelter in That Oklahoma City School « LewRockwell.com Blog

Why There Was No Basement Tornado Shelter in That Oklahoma City School « LewRockwell.com Blog

"Politicians like himself will always spend taxpayers' money in a way that enhances THEIR popularity and maximizes THEIR chances for re-election. There are orders of magnitude more votes to be had in handing out welfare benefits or lavish public employee pensions than in replacing leaky water lines. Public employees are well organized politically; the average taxpaying citizens are not.... Putting a basement in a new school building will not motivate government school teachers to spend thousands of hours campaigning and driving voters to the polls in school buses. Promises of pay and pension increases will."

The writer has a point about politicians, but it doesn't apply to Oklahoma and the way we finance education and school facilities. School bond issues can only be used for capital improvements and equipment, not operating costs. If anything, school bond issue supporters here work for low voter turnout; I've never heard of driving people to the polls in school buses, which I'm pretty sure would be against the law. Heavy construction companies are usually very supportive of school bond issues, since they stand to win the contracts to do the work, and publicly-funded construction can take up the slack when the economy has stalled new commercial construction. There's plenty of political incentive to build school tornado shelters; I suspect the hindrance is practical. Oklahoma just doesn't have many basements. (Remember what happened to Tulsa's buried Belvedere.) Blair, Oklahoma, has an impressively large, partially buried storm shelter on its school playground, easily seen from US 283, about 20' wide by 70' long, built in 1928 after a tornado destroyed the school.