LA. INFRASTRUCTURE- More than 50 civil engineers’ have evaluated Louisiana’s infrastructure…things like roads, bridges, water and sewer systems… and they’ve issued a report card… and Louisiana’s grade is a D+ Recently , Gov. John Bel Edward’s revealed the new capital outlay budget has no funding for any new infrastructure projects, so there’s no immediate relief in sight. Kristina Swallow is president for the American Society of Civil Engineers, the group that put together the Infrastructure Report Card. She explained why should people in Louisiana be concerned about this recent bad grade for infrastructure. "Infrastructure drives our lives and it's something that is often very invisible. We don't think about it, which is a good thing we don't think about it because generally it's working but what we don't
realize is-- and this is when we do think about it is when it fails. And it is actually failing at larger rates. Every day and every year we're seeing more failures and it's actually costing us as American citizens $3400 a year per family, $9 per day per family it's costing us. And if we just invested just a little bit more, it wouldn't cost us, it would actually drive us forward and free up some money for us to spend on things that we would prefer to spend it on like a vacation for the family." Growing up as Americans, people tend to feel that the nation has the best infrastructure in the world. But Swallow explains the feeling doesn't match reality. " In reality, we're finding that our infrastructure is no where near the best globally. And the reason why it's failing is for years we've under-invested for a generation on the infrastructure. We haven't been able to invest as much as needed in the maintenance in the existing infrastructure and we haven't had enough resources to build new or to modernize the infrastructure that exists. So for a generation we've been under-investing in our infrastructure and the bill is coming due, it's just not meeting our needs-- we need to raise that investment." But the need of investment in infrastructure also means revenues need to be allocated but that also means revenues have to be raised often in the form of taxes. Yet today's political environment seems to want to focus more on tax cuts. Swallow says "it's costing us $9 per day per family but it would only cost us $4 per day per family to fix it. And if you put that in perspective, that actually means that we would save money if we actually spent a little bit more. So how would you see that? You'd see that in that you wouldn't sit in (traffic) congestion anymore. You wouldn't spend the taxes or the extra money on fuel because you're stuck in traffic. So it costs us but we don't think about that. We need to talk about that and have the honest cconversations about what we mean when talk about raising a tax in the case when we're talking about infrastructure. We're talking about increasing investment, it's not just a tax, it's an investment in our communities and our families."
You can see the American Society of Civil Engineers’ infrastructure report card online at:
www.infrastructurereportcard.org.
