EESI: Q&A: New Infrastructure Playbook Calls for Adaptable Federal Policy
The New Partnership on Infrastructure (NPI), a bipartisan coalition of government officials and policy experts, recently released their New Playbook on Infrastructure. The coalition was formed by the Accelerator for America (AFA), a nonprofit that “seeks to scale and replicate local solutions to economic insecurity across the country.”
The playbook outlines actionable steps that the federal government can take to create policy that works for different localities. The steps are based on research and interviews with mayors from across the country on barriers and solutions to meeting local infrastructure goals with federal support.
EESI spoke with John Porcari, President of Advisory Services at WSP USA, a member organization of NPI, about the playbook’s recommendations on climate, COVID-19, and the need for federal policy to be responsive to local priorities. Prior to joining WSP, Porcari was Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation for President Obama, and before that he was Secretary of Maryland's Department of Transportation.
Q: How did the New Infrastructure Playbook project with Accelerator for America get started?
Porcari: Accelerator for America was co-founded by Mayor Garcetti in Los Angeles. It's a collection of self-selected mayors of mostly small- and medium-sized cities that create ideas. They call themselves a do-tank rather than a think-tank, because the focus is on doing things. As an example, in Los Angeles they've pioneered a program that gives charity debit cards for food purchases to people who've been adversely impacted or made homeless by the pandemic. This program has spread to 10 other cities. So that's the kind of thing that they do.
We have a great working relationship with Accelerator for America, and we brought them this concept of taking a local government lens to infrastructure policy. There's this common misconception that policy trickles down from Washington. It really bubbles up from local innovation. We wanted to spotlight that with some very specific recommendations based on discussions with mayors. And that's what you see in the NPI playbook.
Q: What were some of the infrastructure policy issues you encountered?
Porcari: There was a lot of frustration from the mayors that the rigid stovepipes in federal infrastructure programs made it difficult to innovate. To install fiber during road work, to close a state road general purpose lane and make it a bus lane, those things are not easy in practice for mayors. We surveyed and interviewed a number of mayors from cities large and small, Republican and Democrat, in every corner of the country, and made sure we understood what some of the federal roadblocks to innovation were. The recommendations you see, by and large, came directly from the experience of mayors who have tried to get something done and had a federal policy, a federal funding prohibition, or some other barrier that stood in their way.
Q: How are the mayors’ concerns about climate change reflected in the report?
Porcari: Mayors are on the front lines of the impacts of climate change. Just one example, wastewater treatment plants are almost by definition at or below the floodplain. Those facilities are more subject to flooding. Potable water delivery systems, especially the aging ones, are less and less adaptable in an era of 500-year storm events. Being able to use federal loan programs like the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) program—the water and wastewater loan program based at EPA—could help build more resilient wastewater treatment plants.
Another example is what's called emergency relief. If you need to rebuild a road or transit system after a natural disaster, you couldn't improve it. You couldn't build the road higher, or take the transit system out of the flood site, or the new higher floodplain. The NPI playbook calls for being able to do "betterments"—rebuilding in a more resilient way after a natural disaster. We made that specific recommendation acknowledging the reality that climate is driving more frequent and more severe storm events and rebuilding infrastructure the same way time after time is madness.
Q: How has COVID added on to or exacerbated the issues that those mayors already face?
Porcari: In a fiscal sense, a lot of cities have had to stop their capital programs and divert resources to other more immediate needs. It could be meals for children, but it's also things like school districts trying to teach children online. We had a city that did a survey and found almost 40 percent of their public-school children did not have access to broadband. How do you teach online without it? It really has shifted the priorities.
Just the totality of services that a city provides, mayors really had to rethink in a post-COVID environment. We've tried to reflect that in the report. For example, it may not be an obvious post-COVID response, but the recommendation to be able to use the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loan program to refinance projects is a direct result of those discussions with mayors because it would free up funds either for infrastructure projects or for other immediate priorities that the cities have.
Q: How does this report engage with the tension between generalized federal policy meeting local needs?
Porcari: This report looks from a local government lens at the federal policies that are in the way. So the recommendations include accelerating environmental reviews with better environmental outcomes, because the two are symbiotic, not mutually exclusive. Another example is getting some of the federal regulatory hurdles out of the way for fiber installation. No one’s really handed Congress an actionable report that has very specific recommendations on what stands in the way of cities building a more environmentally responsible and resilient future, and that’s what this report does.
Q: How do federal policies stand in the way of local decision making?
Porcari: I’ve been on the local side of the equation before, and what you tend to do is go after the available federal funding. Whether it’s the ideal project, whether it best meets community needs or not, in order to build it, you’re pursuing federal funding. In city after city, time after time, you find the local priorities getting distorted by what’s available in terms of federal funding and federal program requirements.
Q: How has your work in local and state policy informed your perspective on national-level infrastructure policy?
Porcari: To be honest, after my experiences at the local and state level, I began working for the Obama administration knowing that the federal government, instead of being a partner, was often an impediment in infrastructure projects. I tried to keep that in mind during my work in the administration, and as a consequence some of the policies and approvals we were able to modify made it easier for local governments to actually build.
It was also important to break down the stovepipes I discussed earlier. Transportation projects aren’t built in a vacuum, they should also be environmental projects in the sense that they can remediate old environmental problems. One example in the DC metro area is when we built the new Woodrow Wilson bridge. We set aside $100 million in the project funding to help remediate Anacostia River. Was that required? No, but we built that into the project description in the NEPA document and it got funded, so we could restore a big part of the Maryland piece of the Anacostia River with project funds.
The concept of environmental restoration and transportation projects going hand in hand is something I felt and feel very passionately about, and we were actually able to make some real changes based on that.
I’m back at the local level right now. It’s great in the sense that it’s where the decisions are made. The federal government should be responsive to local needs, not the other way around.
Authors: Amber Todoroff and Bridget Williams
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Read the full interview here.