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As the Senate debates stimulus provisions, a major component of the final bill will be infrastructure investments. Last week, the American Society of Civil Engineers released a report rating the nation's infrastructure. The overall grade was a "D." The report recommends that the nation invest $2.2 trillion in infrastructure projects over the next five years. Does the stimulus provide a good starting point? During today's OnPoint, D. Wayne Klotz, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, discusses the report and explains why infrastructure funding should play a larger role in the final stimulus bill.
Monica Trauzzi: Welcome to the show. I'm Monica Trauzzi. With us today is Wayne Klotz, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Wayne, thanks for being here.
Wayne Klotz: It's my pleasure, thank you.
Monica Trauzzi: Wayne, your organization just released an updated report card of the nation's infrastructure, in it you assess the status of 15 different categories. So, who's doing well? Who's doing poorly?
Wayne Klotz: Well, we just released an infrastructure report card that covers 15. We gave four C's and 11 B's, and we gave an over all grade of D. so in terms of who's doing well, well, I think you would find not very many.
Monica Trauzzi: So, pretty dismal stuff?
Wayne Klotz: Correct.
Monica Trauzzi: Why has it gotten so bad? What has gone wrong in the past several years that has let us get to this point of a D?
Wayne Klotz: Well, the problem really is not the last several years, but the last 20 or 30 years. We're driving on highways that were built during the Eisenhower years. A lot of our children go to school in schools built when FDR was president. We just simply have not recognized that our infrastructure systems get old and wear out, just like everything else. For instance, you have a car, if you want that car to be maintenance free, then change the oil, keep some air in the tires. It will last a long time. If you don't do that, then you're going to have major repair bills and you're going to have to replace it. That's what's happening with our infrastructure.
Monica Trauzzi: And the House recently voted on an $819 billion stimulus and only a small percentage, about 5 percent is going to infrastructure improvements. You're calling for a $2.2 trillion investment in the nation's infrastructure in this report. I mean that's a huge gap between those two numbers. Why the disconnect?
Wayne Klotz: Well, I think you've just identified the problem. Let me first say that the $2.2 trillion dollars is an investment over five years, so that's not a one-year investment. What we're seeing in the stimulus package is that we're very grateful that President Obama and Congress recognize that infrastructure is a good place to start when you want to create jobs and jumpstart the economy. As a for instance, we know that for every $1 billion that you spend on transportation infrastructure, you actually support 35,000 jobs. That's a pretty effective measure. So, what we're saying to everyone is this is a good thing. Let's go ahead and start, but it's just a start. We have a long way to go and we don't believe that a failing infrastructure can support a healthy economy.
Monica Trauzzi: So, what other legislation are you looking for this year, in the next couple of years, that can sort of bounce off of what's been done in the stimulus and continue to provide the level of investment that you think is necessary?
Wayne Klotz: Well, there are a lot of bills that will be coming up and we are very anxious to make sure that, assuming Congress does complete passage of this economic recovery act that we don't check off the box that says, okay, we took care of infrastructure, because we really haven't. We will be looking at a reauthorization of SAFETEA-LU, which is the Surface Transportation Act. We're going to need to reauthorize the Clean Water Revolving Fund. There's a number of infrastructure bills that provide long-term funding and that's really what we're trying to say. It's time for us to recognize we have to provide long-term funding for our infrastructure. It's important for our economy. It's important for our quality of life. It's important for our environment. Better infrastructure actually improves the environment. For instance, congestion, which we all deal with in our cities, well, congestion actually increases the greenhouse gases that we produce from our vehicles. So, if we can make traffic move faster we reduce emissions. So there's a way you can do it right there without doing research on alternative energies and things, which we support, but there are some very practical things that we can do immediately.
Monica Trauzzi: The stimulus bill is now on its way through the Senate. What are your expectations for how the infrastructure portion might be addressed in the Senate? Any more money you think might come into play?
Wayne Klotz: Well, we've actually been meeting with the committees on the Senate side and initially they have proposed some modest increases over the House bill and it goes across all of the categories. So they're not focusing just simply on transportation, transit or something. They're just adding some more. We fully expect that the Senate will pass the bill, that it will be sent to conference and what we've been told as they would like to get it out by Presidents Day.
Monica Trauzzi: That's what we're hearing too. Energy was given a D+ on the report card. Do you think that President Obama's clean energy initiatives provide an adequate starting point for improving that grade?
Wayne Klotz: Actually, the reason that the grade is where it is, is because our energy grid has been neglected. As a for instance, I'm from Houston, we have a little hurricane called Ike. The fourth-largest city in the United States lost electricity for two weeks. That's not a good thing. We need to find ways to make that not happen.
Monica Trauzzi: And is the Smart Grid one of those ways?
Wayne Klotz: Smart Grid is that. Well, the reason that we gave energy a slight increase in its grade, which was one of the only three that went up, was because there is more investment in the grid now. Clearly, we've got to produce more energy. We're going to have to use all the fuels available to us to make that happen, because the demand for electricity in the United States has gone up by 25 percent in the last 10 years.
Monica Trauzzi: For the first time national levees were included in the report card. And, obviously, these have gotten a lot of attention over the past several years with all the hurricanes we've been having, particularly with Katrina. How bad is the condition of the national levees?
Wayne Klotz: Well, that's part of the problem. We're not sure. Everybody thinks of New Orleans when you think of levees, but there are over 100,000 miles of levees in the United States, 85 percent of those are owned by private entities. So there are really no good records about how they were constructed, are they being maintained? We know we have levees that people are living behind that started out as just levees to protect crop land and now those very same levees are protecting homes and businesses and nobody really can tell you what the condition is. So, a D- was the best we could do. We just wanted to make sure people understand we have a major issue with levees, not just in New Orleans, not just in Sacramento, but all across the United States.
Monica Trauzzi: Final question here. This has been a pretty dismal conversation here, any silver linings to any of the findings of the report?
Wayne Klotz: Well, actually I don't think it's a dismal conversation. I think it's important that our elected leaders in the government are finally talking about infrastructure. We simply cannot have communities without good infrastructure. When you think about it, you can't go to work, you've got to have a drink of water, you need electricity, all those things. Probably the best example of a silver lining is solid waste. Most of us remember that 20 years ago it was predicted that we were all going to be covered up with garbage, but there was a commitment made. There were new regulations. We changed the way we did landfills. People started recycling. We recycle a huge percentage of our waste now, so we've been able to move solid waste up from the D category all the way to C+. And we hope, by the next report card, we can get it up into the B category, because that's where we'd like to put it.
Monica Trauzzi: All right, we'll end it right there. Thanks for coming on the show.
Wayne Klotz: Thank you.
Monica Trauzzi: And thanks for watching. We'll see you back here tomorrow.
[End of Audio]
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