You Can’t Build a Healthy Economy on Crumbling Infrastructure

On Feb. 10, 2022, Informed Infrastructure Editorial Director Todd Danielson interviewed Maria Lehman, president-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and director of U.S. Infrastructure for GHD US.

ASCE has 150,000 members in 177 countries and is the largest publisher of civil engineering materials, including conferences and other forms of knowledge transfer. It also publishes every four years the oft-cited “America’s Infrastructure Report Card” (infrastructurereportcard.org). Lehman will become president of the society in October 2022. The full interview video can be viewed at the top of this page or at bit.ly/3vwhBpx, but we wanted to include some excerpts in this issue.

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Danielson: What’s your opinion of the new Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and how will it help the industry?

Lehman: I’m a big fan of the law. I’ve been working on getting more federal engagement in various classes of infrastructures since 1998 when ASCE did its first Report Card. We’ve been pushing for more funding, because we have been not paying attention. Our infrastructure in a lot of places has outlived its useful life by two or three times the design life. Our infrastructure is not in a midlife crisis, but in an old-age crisis.

We came up with an overall economic view of what happens if we continue to kick the can down the road. The gap between infrastructure needs and all sources being invested was $2.6 trillion over 10 years. If you look at what we got in the act, $2.6 trillion becomes $1.3 trillion over five years. Of the $1.3 trillion that was passed, there was $550 billion of new money. The rest of it was reauthorizing for five years the Surface Transportation Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and several smaller things. But we’re still getting that $550 billion of new money—a little less than half. It’s very significant; there’s never been a bigger investment.

For the bridge program across the country, for example, the intent is to do 15,000 bridges across the country that are in poor and fair condition, with a focus on “last mile” local bridges. It’s going to make a big impact, because I truly believe you can’t build a healthy economy on a crumbling infrastructure.

Danielson: How long do you think it will take the new law to improve U.S. infrastructure in a tangible way?

Lehman: We’re hopeful you’re going to start seeing some things as early as this summer, because a number of projects were in preliminary design or had been shelved. You can put those out pretty quick.

The beauty of this law is because it’s over five years, you can do some of the low-hanging fruit now and still hit some of the game-changing projects that are really going to unite communities and make an impact on underserved communities.

Each state has a State Transportation Improvement Program built from regional ones, whether they’re metropolitan planning organizations in the bigger cities or rural planning organizations in some states. They have this year’s plan as well as next year’s plan. They have five-year plans. They also have a 20-year-long plan of projects that if they had the money they would do.

What will happen with this bill is maybe in the five-year plan, some of the projects in year four or five will move up to year one, two or three—because there’s more money. Then they’ll pull from the long-range plan. There still will be brand-new projects brought in, and they have to get incorporated, but people have already thought about what you would do if you had more money to address it. Same thing with water agencies and wastewater agencies.

When they go to state revolving loan funds, same thing. They’re always oversubscribed for those loan funds for projects. They’ll be able to fund more of the projects that have been in line. In those two areas, it’s just a matter that the bottom of the funnel is bigger. We can put more work through it.

I think in some areas you’re really going to be able to see acceleration pretty quickly, and then the more complicated or larger projects or bigger constituencies will fill in during the outer years.

Danielson: Can you describe a part of the law that isn’t getting a lot of attention, but will be very important to the infrastructure industry?

Lehman: I personally feel that broadband is really important. The infrastructure industry has really not changed much in a hundred years. We still use concrete and steel everywhere. There are some admixtures that are new and some new processes. But if somebody time-traveled from then to now, they’d still recognize what we’re doing. It hasn’t seen the disruptive changes that other industries have seen, because we don’t have broadband everywhere.

And it’s not about rural deserts, it’s about urban deserts. It’s about major highways where you have dropoffs on your cell phones. The internet of things can provide real-time data to a lot of different things to make safer environments, expedite the amount of construction work that can be done and how much of it can be automated, and really change how we deliver projects.

I was talking to a friend who’s working for a startup company doing electric construction vehicles. They need large batteries for powerful engines, but they’re also looking at things like the backup batteries at traffic signals, because the lithium-ion batteries now are so much better. With the old batteries, although you checked it yesterday, it could be dead today, and you don’t have a backup.

Think about the application in traffic signals when your signals go down because there’s no power, or think about safety features around rail crossings. These are transformative. They’re not huge things, but when you start looking at how to get a broadband signal that says: “Your battery that runs your safety gate at XYZ location is running low. You need to go check on it.” It’s going to be much more proactive in the operations and maintenance time period, which we’re typically very bad at. We build it; we forget about it.

There’s great excitement around some of that digitization of the industry and how you really can accelerate how you build things, how you operate them, getting more efficient, how do you take energy down sometimes because it’s really expensive at that load period. Maybe you can change when you’re doing a certain process that takes a lot of energy because you can do it in two hours as well. There’s a lot of excitement about being able to flatten loads, be more cost-effective and efficient, and deliver faster.

Danielson: What should our engineering audience be thinking about in terms of how this law will affect them and how they can use it to their advantage?

Lehman: I think the law is going to affect everyone, because it’s in some cases 60 or 70 percent more funding than we’ve had in the past. We, as an industry, are not a neat bell-shaped curve anymore; we’re following the U.S. population. The baby boomers are a bigger chunk of everything, and as they retire out, the whole idea of workforce development will change.

How we bring younger engineers, contractors and people to the table, and how we jumpstart their expertise is going to become very important. Whoever figures that out is going to win, because there’s going to be plenty of work. There are spots in the country, for example, where you can’t get a new survey done in 2022 because there are no surveyors to do that work. You’re going to have to plan ahead around things, but it’s going to have a very large impact on the industry.

We’re going to have to get more creative about how you do more faster and cheaper; and how you bring up a workforce to be able to do that with you. I’m very happy the bill also includes some of those provisions for workforce development, because it’s going to be a challenge.

I want to add that I think ASCE and the engineering community is very thankful for the fact that after probably close to three decades of promises—through both Democratic and Republican administrations—infrastructure is a priority.

It really behooves us to deliver the best we can in the next five years, because we really need to see these amped-up levels of investment and activity for probably the next 15 to 20 years to be able to bring everything up to snuff. We have to prove from an industry that we’re going to do a good job with this, or we are not going to be getting the next tranche to really step it up again.

I think it’s very important for everybody to really work together to address some of the things that are making us less efficient and effective than we really should be.

Danielson: When you become president of ASCE, what will be some of your goals? Is there anything about the organization you’d like to change?

Lehman: Absolutely there are things I want to change. I wouldn’t be there if I didn’t. First of all, we launched a few years ago the “Future World Vision,” and it’s basically coming up with VR and 3D tools to think about the challenges we might be seeing in 50 years.

If drones are going to be delivering lunches—whether to an office or housing complex—you need a place for them to come into and out of. We’ve never thought about things like that, but definitely in the next 50 years, that’s going to happen.

The big pushout will be next year as a function of having our “Future World Vision: Mega City 2070” fully locked and loaded, and we’ll be doing it through museums across the country, because we need to get people excited about getting into the profession. We need to grow that pipeline.

We need everyone—whether it’s elected officials, city planners—thinking more critically about designing an asset for 50 years, and things are going to look very different in 50 years. I want engineers back in the driver’s seat, leading these big projects. We have given planning away, for example, to the Big Four accounting firms. We saw during COVID, they have a very small engineering workforce. They didn’t anticipate the problems that happen in a system of systems.

When something goes wrong, there’s a domino effect. COVID caused all kinds of things to go sideways, right? I think when you get somebody who is really taught to think critically and have plan B, C and D in their pocket—because that’s how engineers are wired—it really helps you deliver those things. Leading through the lifecycle, looking at not only construction but all the way through decommissioning of whatever that asset is and making sure we’re making the proper lifecycle decisions.

After 23 years, [U.S. infrastructure] went from a D to a C-minus. We can’t accept that, so we have to raise the grades. I think you’re going to see it with this investment, some in three years from now when we do [the next Report Card], but definitely eight years from now, you’re going to see an impact.

ASCE is drastically changing. There’s more open content. People are less likely to travel to conventions. We need to make sure we’re sustainable moving forward.

Just like any other major organization, it’s hard to get all the information into the right hands. We just updated the website to use AI to watch what you’re looking at and what you’re interested in so it customizes to your interests. You just don’t get volume of material; you get things relevant to you.

I’ve been in the business for 40 years, and things really haven’t gotten much better for women and minorities in the business. We’re up to about 30 percent women, who are a majority of the population—that’s disconcerting. But it’s not just about the pipeline; it’s also about retainage. SWE, the Society of Women Engineers, did a study right before COVID that found in all engineering, 70 percent of women left engineering within 20 years of graduation. You can’t solve that math problem. You can’t take half the population away, and then have 70 percent of them leave before they’re really leading in the organization. We have to be different.

People don’t want to be pushed as hard as they have been in the past. Employers are going to have to change their mindset for everybody’s sake, because the 70-year-olds who took their kids out on Sunday to see their project sites and work 70 hours the rest of the week, those people don’t exist anymore.

We have lifelong members aged 65-plus, and many of them are still working. Many of them still have a lot to give, but we haven’t found a way to reach back to our students and our younger members to teach them the ropes, whether it’s in policy, whether it’s in supercharging their technical skills or what we call “power skills”: their communications, how you run a project, consider the financing, make those relationships.

It’s not formal mentoring; it’s more like “phone-a-friend” mentoring. Doing much more of that will benefit both sides. I want to see a lot more of that going on.