So the latest report from the city’s department of transportation estimates a cost of $85 million to repaint the Brooklyn Bridge, which is rusting to the point of “serious deterioration” and hasn’t been painted since 1991.The department’s annual reports have listed the paint job as being “in design” since 2002. In the meantime, the bridge, one of the city’s icons of engineering and architecture, rusts away, the victim of neglect and graffiti vandals, as documented in photographs in today’s New York Sun by Konrad Fiedler. A spokesman for the transportation department, Craig Chin, says the long-awaited paint is not expected to be applied until 2009. By then the cost of the paint job will probably go up by another few million; between 2004 and 2005, the estimated cost climbed by $11 million.

Why should it cost so much to get a bridge painted? Much of the bridge is stone or cable and doesn’t require paint at all. For the parts of the bridge that do require painting, $85 million strikes us as a steep price. It strikes us that an enterprising New Yorker could take the $85 million, hire 50 union painters at $1 million apiece, tell them to work for a year and buy their own paint, and still have $35 million left over in profits to spend on work by less expensive painters, like, say, Pablo Picasso.

Or one could manage the bridge better. A spokesman for the Golden Gate Bridge on the coast tells us that the San Francisco landmark has a staff of full-time painters. Allowing the Brooklyn Bridge to deteriorate like this will strike many New Yorkers as a default. Keeping the bridge in a condition that would keep the Roeblings proud is the least the city can do for a span that has served New Yorkers and Brooklynites and tourists well since its completion in 1883. Without the bridge New York and Brooklyn might never have merged into one unified New York, as they did in 1898. The bridge has been a backup for pedestrians in case of transit strikes or blackouts, a scene for political marches and protests that are at the heart of our freedom, a site for tourists to take pictures and for lovers to stroll.

The police department has been doing its part. It has deployed an extensive effort to protect the bridge from a terrorist attack. But destruction can come to a bridge by slow rust, flaking paint, and the vandalism of graffiti as well as from a more dramatic attack by a foreign enemy. Mayor Bloomberg has set some ambitious and lofty goals for his second term, but we’d settle for a Brooklyn Bridge of which the city doesn’t have to be embarrassed.