President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 bill earlier this month, and now it appears that Congress’ attention is turning to infrastructure.
During the presidential campaign, Biden talked about his big plans for infrastructure. A $2.4 trillion price tag was tossed about; Biden said he wants his administration to invest more in infrastructure than this country has since the Eisenhower administration.
Battle lines are being drawn, of course. Today’s political climate is not at all conducive, it seems, to bipartisanship, but that isn’t the point here.
The point is that experts continue to insist that serious and sustained infrastructure investments are imperative.
The American Society of Civil Engineers released its 2021 Report Card For America’s Infrastructure earlier this month. The organization gave the nation’s infrastructure an overall grade of C-, an improvement from the D+ it gave the United States in 2017.
The ASCE has issued a report every four years since 1998 and said the nation has struggled to get above a D since it began grading. In the ASCE system, D means poor and C means mediocre, echoing what my teachers told me throughout my school years.
The society said in its report that it has detected three trends:
- A maintenance gap,
- Admirable progress on the state and local levels and
- A lack of data in some infrastructure segments.
The ASCE said that to solve the investment gap, funding must be increased across the board, at all levels of government and the private sector, from 2.5% of GDP to 3.5%. It also said that Americans “must be willing” to pay for the increased cost, which made me wonder if the American Society of Civil Engineers had paid much attention to American society lately.
Arkansas, whose grade hasn’t been released yet, earned a D four years ago. State grades are released on a rolling basis — Texas, for example, earned a C and Ohio a C-.
The ASCE has a team of 31 civil engineers that grades 17 categories of infrastructure, ranging from bridges to dams to roads to schools. Nationally, every category earned a C+ or worse except the rail system, which was given a B, and the nation’s ports, which got a B-.
The ASCE said that while the nation’s grade improved a bit the long-term investment gap increased as we are paying approximately half of our needs. It estimated that in the past four years, the gap grew from $2.1 trillion (over 10 years) to $2.59 trillion.
That coincides roughly with the estimates of the cost — theoretically — of the Biden infrastructure plan. The ASCE said if infrastructure investments aren’t increased, the lack of funding will prove costly by 2039: $10 trillion of GDP lost, 3 million jobs and more than $2 trillion in exports.
On the state level, although there wasn’t a grade, the news wasn’t good.
More than 30% of the state’s roads are rated in poor condition, which costs each Arkansas driver about $671 a year in maintenance and repairs, according to the ASCE. The state has nearly 13,000 bridges, and just under 5% are rated structurally deficient.
To clarify, a bridge is considered “structurally deficient” if its deck, superstructure or substructure gets a substandard rating. It doesn’t mean that the bridge is about to crash down at any moment.
The ASCE said Arkansas’ drinking water needs will amount to $7.4 billion during the next 20 years. The state’s schools also have a $350 million funding gap.
To top it off, 193 dams in the state are rated as “high-hazard potential,” which certainly doesn’t sound good.
Sign up for Daily E-news
