Last week, the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved a new six year authorization of federal surface transportation programs. This is a crucial first step in the process to enact a new transportation authorization before the current law, SAFETEA-LU, expires on September 30, 2009.  This new bill is very important to civil engineers, but we at ASCE know that sometimes it’s difficult to keep up with all the changes on Capitol Hill.

We have the answer…

Introducing ASCE’s new 2009 Surface Transportation Authorization Action Page! The ASCE Government Relations team will be monitoring the progress of the legislation (not to mention, working hard with Congress to make sure it reflects the priorities of civil engineers) and posting regular updates on the new page. Not only will we be reporting on the news, we’ll offer analysis on how it affects our members. If you have questions, comments, or even inside information, please post it here on this blog and we will try to answer your questions or update the site to reflect them.

The Action Page will have all the information you need to keep on top of developments on the Hill, but in order to keep it updated we need… well…Action! Take this opportunity to visit ASCE’s Click and Connect with Congress Advocacy Website and send your legislators a message saying you support swift action on the surface transportation authorization.

After many, many months of waiting, the new surface transportation authorization bill is expected to be released tomorrow, June 17. The current authorization, SAFETEA-LU, expires on September 30.

Two federally chartered commissions, as well as most groups in the transportation industry, have recommended a transformational change in the way the federal government oversees transportation. Most of the recommendations center on changing the focus of the Department of Transportation from operating many different modes and programs to reconfiguring the programs to meet specific goals such as freight movement or environmental stewardship. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar (D-MN) has indicated that there will be major program reformation, as recommended, but hasn’t released specifics. The release of the bill will finally illustrate what he intends to do.

ASCE graded the nation’s Roads at a D- , Transit at a D , and   Bridges at a C on the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure and also recommends major transportation program reforms. The Society will be monitoring the progress of the bill and reporting on it periodically on this blog.

For more information on ASCE’s transportation recommendations, please visit ASCE’s policy website.  

Last summer we ran into a little bit of a problem. Actually, it was an $8 billion problem. The Highway Trust Fund that provides the cash for the federal surface transportation program was about to become insolvent due to decreased revenues from the federal motor fuels tax. After a few tries – and even a crazy scheme by some presidential candidates to stop collecting the gas tax for the summer – Congress passed a “one-time” fix and transferred money from the General Fund into the Trust Fund to keep transportation projects going until the program would be authorized in late 2009.

Well guess what, the “one-time” fix wasn’t really that. Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Barbara Boxer (D-CA) announced this week that the Highway Trust Fund will again become insolvent if between $7 and $10 billion is not allocated to cover the shortfall.

At the same time, proposals for the new surface transportation authorization to replace SAFETEA-LU are already coming to light. Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee James Oberstar (D-MN) has indicated that he will release his draft legislation in the coming days. Sneak previews of the bill put the authorized funding level at about $450 billion. This amounts to a major increase in funding for highway and transit programs across the country – something that is welcomed by all who support transportation programs.

What is not so clear, however, is how to pay for this big new investment. The Obama Administration and many members of Congress have stated their opposition to raising the federal motor fuels tax or beginning to implement a vehicle-miles-travelled revenue system. Neither Rep. Oberstar nor Sen. Boxer has indicated that they intend to buck that opposition and implement new revenue streams in this bill. Sure, nobody likes to pay more in taxes. But when you plan to pay for a big spending increase with a fund that needs to be “fixed” every year because it can’t keep up with the current demands on it, the math just doesn’t work.

We must commend our leaders in Congress and the administration for realizing the importance of federal transportation programs to the health, welfare, public safety, and economy of our nation. The current leadership does seem committed to making much-needed investments and modernizations. What they haven’t quite grasped yet, however, is that it can’t be done at bargain basement prices.

The current revenue mechanisms used to fund the surface transportation are inadequate. Raising taxes is tough to do, but political leaders must be willing to make these hard decisions. Without them, in a few years we’ll be in a much bigger fix than we are now.

I’m blogging today from the World Environmental and Water Resources Congress  sponsored by the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of ASCE in Kansas City, Missouri. Over 800 engineers from around the world have gathered to share the latest advances in their field and to network with peers.

As part of the program, ASCE is presenting the findings of the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. We’re showing engineers how they can use the Report Card to educate the public and lawmakers about the state the nation’s infrastructure and what they can do to improve it. In a keynote address to the entire conference group, ASCE 2008-2009 President D. Wayne Klotz, P.E., D.WRE, F.ASCE, gave an overview of the Report Card’s water and environment categories and made a special request to the attendees to use their professional expertise to advocate for the infrastructure  improvement this country so desperately needs.

A “water guy” himself, Klotz reminded the group that as environmental engineers, they don’t just design and operate drinking and wastewater systems, they provide clean that is essential to public health. In so many parts of the world, he said, people don’t have access to safe drinking water and sanitation services – which leads to disease and inhibits economic development.

Luckily, engineers at the conference –and anyone reading from home- can take immediate action on water issues. The Senate is currently considering legislation, the Water Infrastructure Financing Act (S.1005) that would authorize about $39 billion in drinking, waste, and stormwater investments. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved the bill last week and now it moves to the full Senate for consideration. The full House already passed similar legislation (H.R. 1272) by a vote of 317-101 on March 12 that only included clean water initiatives - the differences in the bills will be worked out later in a conference committee.   You can send an email to your Senator and ask them to support final passage of the bill by visiting ASCE’s Click and Connect with Congress advocacy website.

As engineers talk with friends and colleagues, it’s important to use your expert technical background to educate others about the state of the nation’s infrastructure. Studies show that the public views engineers as authoritative sources for information: now you just need to get out there and prove them right! 

the National Journal has a great new feature, the Transportation Expert’s Blog, that brings together experts in the transportation policy field to discuss a wide range of topics and issues relating to transportation. This week’s topic questions the future of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) given the recent collapse of a deal to privatize Midway Airport in Chicago.

As an expert on the blog, ASCE’s Executive Director Patrick J. Natale, P.E., F.ASCE had this to say about the future of PPPs:

“Public private partnerships (PPPs) make the public nervous, particularly as they relate to the nation’s critical infrastructure systems. If PPPs are going to become well-established options for infrastructure financing—and they must given the staggering costs of addressing current and future needs—we need to acknowledge that fact and address it head on. “

You can read the rest of this post on the blog.

In other news…

The Michigan Section of ASCE just released their own state Report Card that grades the state’s infrastructure at a D. Civil Engineers in Michigan believe that improving infrastructure is essential in a state that has in recent years seen major economic decline, “Michigan’s infrastructure is in dire condition. Reversing the decay of our most valuable assets is essential to reviving Michigan’s fortunes.” said the authors of the report.

Yesterday afternoon, ASCE participated in a Congressional briefing on the Homeland Security aspects of the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. The briefing was part of a series hosted by the Security for a New Century Coalition that brings together Hill staffers and experts in a bi-partisan forum to discuss new challenges to national security.

Two members of the Advisory Council that developed the Report Card, David Gehr, M.ASCE, and Paul F. Mlakar, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE briefed the group. Gehr gave the attendees an overview of the Report Card and explained the overall condition of the nation’s infrastructure, while Mlakar, a former chairman of ASCE’s Committee on Critical Infrastructure explained the concept of resilience and made recommendations for how infrastructure should be planned and designed to make it more resistant to hazards – both natural and man-made.

One of the Report Card’s 5 Key Solutions is to promote sustainability and resilience, and so ASCE jumped at the chance to share this important message with the security community. Resilience refers to the capability to prevent or protect against significant multihazard threats and incidents (either man-made or natural) and to recover expeditiously and reconstitute critical services with minimum damage to public safety and health, the economy, and national security. The nation’s infrastructure systems face challenges everyday whether it be guarding against potential terrorist attacks or withstanding strong storms. The public may not pay much attention to their water service on a daily basis – but certainly do when it is disrupted. Part of improving the nation’s infrastructure is building in ways to resist these problems or make it easy to get everything back to normal as soon as possible.

An easy way to remember the concept of resilience and how it should be applied to infrastructure is through the “4 R’s”:

• Robustness – simply build things to be stronger, so they can’t be destroyed (or make it really tough!)
• Redundancy – if something fails, do you have a back-up? Currently, most bridges are built in multiple spans, so if one collapses, traffic can still flow.
• Rapidity – can you get something back to working order quickly? Many times, it becomes too difficult or expensive to build systems to be really robust, so sometimes it’s better to build something that can be easily fixed and just allow it to fail in certain cases.
• Resourcefulness – can you think of a new and creative way to solve a problem?

We can already predict some of the challenges America’s infrastructure will face in the future: increased demand, dwindling funds, decay from lack of maintenance. But there are some things we can’t predict that well: like how individuals or mother nature may behave, but we make ourselves ready to deal with them. Infrastructure is meant to protect public safety. A sure way to do that is by building resilient systems. 

For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to dig into the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure too far beyond the grades and the key facts and figures, a great way to familiarize yourself with the ways we can make significant improvements to the nation’s infrastructure is through the Raising the Grades Case Studies offered for each category. The case studies feature communities all over the country who have solved infrastructure problems in unique and outstanding ways.

So outstanding are some of these examples, that ASCE recently named one of them, the Orange County, California Groundwater Replenishment (GWR) System as its top award-winner for 2009. The Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award (OCEA) goes each year to the project that best employed creative and effective solutions to infrastructure challenges. Faced with severe water shortages in Southern California, the GWR treats wastewater through an advanced purification process and then returns it to the naturally occurring groundwater system – at a higher quality standard than that of drinking water. The GWR offers a sustainable solution to meeting long-term water needs in a traditionally drought-plagued region.

Before the GWR designers’ engineering peers elected it to receive the OCEA award, however, the system had already been featured as a Raising the Grades Case Study in the 2009 Report Card. The GWR meets many of the goals set by the Report Card’s 5 Key Solutions including sustainability and long-term planning. The Orange County GWR helps prove the point that with creative thinking, the problems we face are really solvable.

The Report Card also features case studies in other categories that range from simple safety modifications that have drastically reduced highway fatalities to community food waste recycling that that provides residents with environmentally friendly fertilizer, and everything in between. So next time you have a few minutes, check out the Report Card’s Raising the Grades Case Studies – and you might find out a solution to one of your problems.

 Click here to find ASCE’s Water Infrastructure video that features the Orange County GWR    

This blog generally explores the ways in which increased government funding for infrastructure improvement, expansion, and renewal. But I don’t believe that the answer is necessarily all tied up in just bricks and mortar – we can’t forget the importance of the little gray cells either. I’m talking of course about innovation, a.ka. Research and Development/R&D, and the need to make sure it gets the funding it needs to start dreaming up the solutions of tomorrow.

We know will be forced to deal with challenges in the future that we don’t today – like what will a transportation system not based on fossil fuels look like, or how do we supply enough water for future generations? All tough questions that researchers are trying to answer at labs and universities across the country. While federal dollars support important institutions where research is carried out, such as the National Science Foundation, the National Academies, and the National Institute for Standards and Technology, it is still not enough to keep pace with the growing need.

There is some hope that things are changing and that the government is interested in ramping up efforts to strengthen federal research programs. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) invested billions of dollars in R&D efforts in many different sectors. Additionally, this week the House is expected to vote on a bill sponsored by Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN), the  National Water Research and Development Initiative Act (H.R. 1145)  that would coordinate national research and development efforts on water and work to ensure adequate water supplies in the future. Click here for more information on ARRA investments.

Many of the problems facing infrastructure today can be fixed just by putting shovels in the ground, but we need to continue the trend of finding new and innovative solutions to both today and tomorrow’s problems. As the publisher of dozens of academic journals, books, and textbooks , ASCE is firmly committed to advancing the profession of civil engineering and encouraging life-long learning. With increased federal R&D investment, we can make it happen!

Let’s face it, there are some “show-stopper” categories on the Report Card for America’s Infrastructure . You’ve got your Roads, your Bridges, your Wastewater, that everyone wants to talk about, and they are important, but what about the other categories? They’re just as important, and in just as bad a shape, as the rest.

Earning just a D grade on the 2009 Report Card, Hazardous Waste grades the condition of the nations Brownfields and Superfund sites. Across the country, there are hundreds of thousands of contaminated, disused, or abandoned sites that once contained things like industrial plants or landfills and are now in need of remediation. Not only would cleaning up these sites help the environment, they have the ability to create much-needed economic activity.

As many of these sites are in urban areas, the nation’s mayors have long been leaders in educating the public (and at times the federal government) about the economic benefits of redeveloping brownfields. The U.S. Conference of Mayors’ 2008 annual report on brownfields found that cities that invested in redevelopment realized a total of $408 million more in tax revenues and 191,338 new jobs were created as a result. Those figures were drawn from a survey of only 150 cities, just think of the possibilities if every city worked toward redeveloping its abandoned and disused areas.  

Despite the benefits of site remediation, the problem seems to be growing. Just last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced the addition of nine sites to the National Priorities List – a list of sites so badly contaminated that they qualify for remediation funding under the federal Superfund program – and identified 13 more that could be added later. There are about 1200 sites on this list, and in 2008, the EPA only completed remediation on 28. Previously, there were special taxes levied on likely polluters, but they expired in 1995. Superfund taxes have not been reinstated and Congress has yet to create a dedicated funding source. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act invested $700 million in Superfund and Brownfields, but it’s a long way to go to cover the nearly $77 billion needed over five years to keep on schedule.

All around us, contaminated and abandoned sites sit waiting for the work to be done that will make them safe and economically viable. If we want to build infrastructure that will provide lasting benefits for years to come, there’s no better way to do it than by cleaning up the nation’s waste sites.

Chances are they have, but they need to hear about it from more people. We at ASCE have been busily getting the word out here on Capitol Hill. And while I like to think we do a great job, the endorsement of a constituent is always the most effective way to make sure a legislator supports an issue. This is where you, the blog reader and constituent of your local Congressman/Senator/State Assembly Member/Alderman – you name it, comes in. In order to spread the word about the need to save America’s infrastructure, we need you to let your elected officials know you care and want them to do something about it.

As it happens, Congress just left Washington for a two week Spring District Work Period.  Many Representatives and Senators will be spending some quality time with constituents back home.  Take advantage of these opportunities to visit with your lawmakers and share information about the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure without making a trip to Washington, D.C. 

Tips to get you started:

-           Check local media and/or your elected officials’ websites for Town Hall Meetings, local appearances and office hours - these are great opportunities to meet lawmakers in a casual setting and pose a few questions to start a dialog.

-           Gather a small group of fellow ASCE members or just your neighbors who care about infrastructure to request a meeting. Click here for more information or contact ASCE government relations for assistance at govwash@asce.org or 202-789-7850.

-                      For more tips and information, visit ASCE’s website.

Don’t forget your state and local officials! Now’s a great time to visit your federal representatives, but your state and local representatives also have a great deal of influence over infrastructure decisions, so make sure they know about the Report Card as well. Most likely, they are accessible to you more times out of the year, so try catching up with them in a few weeks after you’ve contacted your U.S. Congressman or Senator. You can find out state and local officials’ contact information through ASCE’s Click and Connect System.

Don’t have time to meet in person? Go to ASCE’s Report Card Action Center and send an email message in just a few seconds!