I'm going to veer off the Trump/Hilary debate for a moment to point out something about our infrastructure deficit.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, (http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/) the U.S. needs to invest $3.6 trillion in our infrastructure by 2020. That $1.7 billion figure, therefore, amounts to 0.00047% of what we need to spend, according to them, and that is just for "national" infrastructure.
At the local level, streets need to be repaved, probably about once every 12 to 15 years. I don't know exactly how many miles of road Granite has, but if I had to guess, it's probably between 300 and 400 miles of roads. And, I would venture to say that the average road width is about 36 feet. So, the city has roughly 350 miles x 5,280 feet per mile x 36 feet wide square feet of road to maintain, which equals 66,528,000 square feet of roadways. The average cost per square foot to repave a road is about $2. So, once every 12 to 15 years, Granite needs to come up with $133,056,000 in order to adequately maintain all of its roads (not counting sidewalks, curbs, alleys, traffic lights/signs or wastewater infrastructure).
This is just for one town. Every town in the U.S. has to do the same thing. Now, giving $1.7 billion to a foreign government may be a bad idea, but in the grand scheme, we have a much bigger problem.
the Federal Budget is $3.8 Trillion and only $85 billion is spent per year on transportation infrastructure.
As for local cities, it looks like Granite's budget is somewhere in the range of $26 million per year, based on what I can find online.
Therefore, in 15 years, Granite will spend a total of $390 million, excluding inflation. In other words, the City would need to spend 34.1% of its budget (or nearly $8.9 million per year) on road improvements on a recurring, annual basis, just to keep them up, and that's without fixing any sidewalks, etc. In contrast, Granite is spending less than 14% or $3.6 million per year, (and most of that is probably going to other things, like plowing streets, mowing, and labor/overhead, etc.)
If you look at the city's budget forecast (http://www.granitecity.illinois.gov/docs/FY%202016-2017%20Budget.pdf), it doesn't look like the problem is misappropriation of money, per se, but lack of funding. Of the City's $26 million, about $21 million comes from taxes, so in order to meet the road infrastructure need, they would have to increase taxes by 25% (5.3/21) just to keep the roads maintained. (That, or they'd need to shred the police and fire budgets.)
In other words, pretty much no matter what local, State, or the Federal governments do, we will likely never be able to afford to maintain all of our infrastructure, as is. The U.S. is going to be forced to downsize, or consolidate into denser, more urban areas. Either that, or we need to double our population of taxpaying people in the next 15 years.