The graffiti on the Brooklyn Bridge, we’re glad to report after our morning walk, is gone. This follows our report on how the superannuated span, as emblematic of the city as the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, has been falling into disrepair. Much remains to be done at the bridge, despite the claim, by Commissioner Iris Weinshall in a letter in the adjacent columns, that the bridge is not suffering from neglect. The fact is that its steel elements are rusting, exposed to the elements by lack of paint. Things have gotten so bad that cleaning the rust and paint the contraption is projected to take years and cost $85 million.

It gets worse. It turns out that the way the city will pay for the upcoming paint job is symptomatic of New York at its fiscal worst. The bulk of that $85 million, or whatever the cost shoots up to by the time painters actually arrive on site, will come not from the city’s operating budget but from its capital budget. That means the city will be paying for the project with borrowed money, for New York’s capital kitty is financed almost entirely through bonding. Taxpayers will be paying the principal and interest for decades.

Routine maintenance of a capital asset like a bridge should come from the operating budget, while the debt-funded capital budget is reserved for new infrastructure projects that will enable new economic activity to expand the tax base to pay off the debt. Since New York’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s, strict controls cover what can be counted as a “capital” expense. They set a threshold for the size and term of a project. Even then the rules leave a lot of leeway. The repainting as currently envisioned is expensive enough to qualify as a capital project, and the “useful life” of the paint job might arguably be four years or longer.

It would be overstating things to suggest that the city is doing anything shady by calling this a capital project instead of an operating project. That’s about the best that can be said for its modus operandi, however. Classifying a project as capital makes it more expensive because then taxpayers need to pay interest and associated fees in addition to the base cost of the project. The error is compounded because the city makes this mistake so frequently, shortchanging routine maintenance until it reaches the scale of a capital project.

In the latest capital budget, 47% of the $61 billion the city plans to spend on capital projects between 2006 and 2015 will be for projects to keep existing assets in a “state of good repair” — projects like the Brooklyn Bridge repainting. That places a squeeze on genuinely new capital building projects, especially because another 24% of the capital budget will be devoted to replacing existing but obsolete structures and of the remaining 29%, a large tranche will go toward such market-distorting programs as, say, “affordable housing.”

As a result, debt service keeps mounting. By 2010, the city is expected to be paying $6.1 billion out of its $61 billion operating budget to support debt service, according to a researcher at the Citizens Budget Commission, Elizabeth Lynam. That will represent a 33% increase over debt service in 2006, while the overall operating budget is projected to increase “only” 11% in that period. It becomes a vicious circle. Debt service’s bite, plus spiraling costs for social programs like Medicaid, squeeze the operating budget, leading the city to fund more maintenance projects from the capital budget, increasing the debt service, and so on.

“Because painting the Brooklyn Bridge isn’t really a ‘capital asset’ and because it will be funded with debt, it’s very likely that by the time the bridge needs a paint job again, we’ll still be paying the debt costs for this planned paint job,” a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, Nicole Gelinas, tells us. Ms. Gelinas politely describes the city’s financing plan for the bridge project as “fiscally imprudent.” We suspect that future New Yorkers will be able to think of a few other choice words as they write their checks to the city tax man.

One of the things that greets a walker over the bridge is a handsome display of brass plaques naming the officials on whose watch the bridge was built or rebuilt. Why not add a new plaque listing the debts that were piled onto a new generation of New Yorkers just to paint the bridge on the watch of Mayor Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall? Call it the Bloomberg-Weinshall Bridge Painting Debt. Their images could be burnished into the bronze in bas-relief.