Part of it is Charlie Deferred Maintenance Baker, part of it is the state capture that results from effective single party rule allowing a small number of companies easy access to the people making the rules on bidding jobs and procurement, and part of it, perversely enough, is Prop 2½. Because municipalities maintain good bond ratings by borrowing money, and because every bureaucracy 's primary objective is to expand, the override rule incentivizes expanding every budget by 2.49% every year, so a lot of things that should get done only get done in small portions (one year we borrow the money to bury the fiber or whatever, and the next year we borrow to fix the road we destroyed the year before, and each project only gets done 130 feet at a time to maximize the number of joints in the road and splices in whatever utility they're running.