The Biden Administration will host a summit this fall to help cities and states in line for federal infrastructure funds avoid the tangle of red tape that is known to stall American projects.
As funds begin to flow from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the government is eyeing ways to manage issues like permitting, community opposition and litigation, which have long driven up the costs and timeline of American infrastructure projects. Those challenges are on top of the current economic hurdles of inflation and a tight labor force.
“We’re really focused on how to actually build things again in this country,” Ryan Berni, White House senior infrastructure advisor, said Wednesday during a panel on infrastructure spending at the Brookings Municipal Finance Conference.
The administration wants to “reconstruct the process so the system works better,” Berni said.
The summit will focus on improving project delivery and the administration’s permitting action plan and highlight projects that have gone smoothly.
The White House has unfurled its own set of red tape with the IIJA, said DJ Gribbin, founder of consulting firm Madrus and former Special Assistant to President Trump for Infrastructure, and one of the panelists at the conference.
With 375 different programs, including 125 brand new ones, and new reporting and regulatory requirements for all agencies, the IIJA is a “hot mess,” Gribbin said.
“It creates lots of communication but every one of those communications takes time and effort,” Gribbin said. “There’s going to be lots of programs, lots of money, lots of chaos.”
Berni defended the bill, saying the administration has created a team at the White House to focus on project delivery. He noted that the feds feds have already sent out $110 billion to cities and states.
“We are breaking ground on projects,” he said. He added that the administration expects that some of the money won’t be spent for 10 to 12 years, as the funding is structured to go out over the next five years, and planning for some projects will take a few years after that.
Early community involvement is one way to minimize litigation and other problems on the back end, Berni said.
That was a key lesson learned in the Colorado I-70 project, which took more than a decade, said Shoshana Lew, director of the Colorado Department of Transportation.
“Do more in the beginning so you work through it in year one and not year nine,” she said. “Do it at the beginning and don’t argue about it for eight years.”
Lew added that for controversial projects, the best approach is to acknowledge the controversy and be clear about the risks. “Sometimes the projects that take long have fundamental problems,” she said.
Gribbin warned that community involvement could spark not-in-my-backyard, or NIMBYism, for crucial infrastructure projects.
They could “end up taking the NIMBY program…and creating a new NIMC, not-in-my-community, program,” Gribbin said. “You’re handing communities vetoes over critical roads or transmissions or [other] infrastructure” projects.
On the inflation front, Lew said issuers have a responsibility to ensure that costs are real and that projects don’t balloon too much.
“We’re getting nontrivial pressure from many parts of the industry to approve cost overages, and we’re not going to,” she said. “Identify whether it’s worth paying for the price of inflation right now, that conversation has to happen on every single project right now.”
Berni said the White House’s mandate is to help launch projects that are built “on time, on task and under budget.”
“We have to be able to build things better and faster in this country and you don’t have to be a Democrat or a Republican to agree with that,” he said.