Blaine Leonard, of the Utah Department of Transportation and the President-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), gave the opening keynote at GITA 2009 today. His talk focussed on the 2009 ASCE Scorecard on American infrastructure and what the stimulus means for addressing some of the infrastructure challenges that the ASCE has successfully attracted public attention to.
Mr. Leonard presented a breakdown of the part of the ARRA spend that the ASCE believes is going to infrastructure, something over $70 billion, and then discussed the short fall for several of the items.
The key takeway I left with is that the stimulus is making a significant dent, but by itself it is insufficient to resolve the problem. Of the $2.2 trillion the ASCE estimates is required to bring American infrastructure up to an acceptable level, meaning B- or C+, the money currently allocated by all levels of government is about 45% of what is necessary.
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