By now, most Arizonans aren’t thinking of the Aug. 1 collapse of the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis and the people who died in the tragedy.

We’ve mourned the fatalities. We haven’t yet realized the affect broken bridges and other major disasters ultimately have on our insurance rates.

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We’ve been told a similar collapse won’t happen here. Gov. Janet Napolitano ordered a statewide review of bridge safety. State, county and city officials say our bridges are inspected regularly and they’re safe.

Shucks. In these parts, we tear down freeway bridges and underpasses ourselves. We don’t let accidents or natural disasters do it for us.

Besides, OUR governor would sign a bill appropriating money to bring our bridges and highways up to snuff, not veto it like the Minnesota governor did.

The problem is that our legislators aren’t likely to pass a bill like that for Napolitano to sign. The majority has shown no inclination to spend what’s needed for infrastructure. Like Minnesota, we haven’t raised our state gasoline tax in decades.

We also probably couldn’t get as much federal money for Tucson and Pima County from this administration as Minneapolis will. Most folks in New Orleans would agree and some might say it has something to do with voter registration.

Furthermore, transportation isn’t Arizona’s only infrastructure problem.

We have a long tradition of deferring maintenance.

Look at our state buildings, our colleges and universities and our elementary, middle and high schools.

When Arizona legislators underfund public education, maintenance of school buildings is one of the first budget items cut. There are no immediate consequences and we hope we can catch up later.

Ditto for city and county buildings. Council members and county supervisors seem to prefer spending money on exotic projects like training volunteers to trap feral cats so they can be spayed or neutered instead of investing in maintenance and repairs.

Our buildings can wait till next year. But like "tomorrow" in some love songs, "next year" rarely comes.

Tucson businessman Jesse Lugo, a former Tucson City Council candidate, has been warning for years about the deterioration of the 22nd Street Overpass west of Campbell Avenue.

A couple of years ago, city officials finally listened and reduced the permitted loads for trucks using the bridge over the Union Pacific railroad tracks.

But they didn’t repair the overpass, and they probably won’t until the feds give them some money.

City Transportation Director Jim Glock told reporters after the Minnesota disaster the overpass is safe. Lugo said he disagrees.

We can only hope and pray Glock is right this time.

Here come more critters

Environmental activists are already getting in line for goodies from the next president. They think the 2008 winner will be more friendly to them than the Bush administration has been.

On Aug. 2, Forest Guardians filed a petition for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to "protect" the black-tailed prairie dog by designating hundreds of thousands of acres in Arizona and other Rocky Mountain states as its range.

On the same day, Tucson’s Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit in Phoenix to force Fish and Wildlife to designate critical habitat here for jaguars.

And on Aug. 6, one of the center’s employees wrote a piece in the Arizona Daily Star pleading for federal protection for several other species you’ve probably never seen - the Mexican garter snake, the loach minnow, the spikedace and the roundtail chub.

Each request will mean giving more land to government and/or hiring more bureaucrats to keep us from setting foot on it.

Enough already! We’ve been through too many furors about red squirrels, pygmy owls and other "endangered" critters that aren’t really endangered.

Tucsonans even had a mini-crisis in the 1990s about how to get rid of prairie dogs in Reid Park without hurting them or their feelings.

As I wonder how much public money these new campaigns will waste, that feral cat project I mentioned earlier might be a better idea than any of them.

E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Steve Emerine, a Tucson resident since 1960, has run Steve Emerine Strategic Public Relations since 1994. He is a former local newspaper reporter, editor and columnist and served as Pima County Assessor from 1973 to 1980. He is a regular Monday guest on the John C. Scott radio talk show, which airs from 3 to 5 p.m. weekdays on The Jolt KJLL 1330-AM. This column appears weekly in Inside Tucson Business.