NORTH AMERICA Ӏ INFRASTRUCTURE BILL
BuILDING BACK BETTER
Chris Smith, Vice President Transportation at the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association, speaks to Cranes Today about the opportunities and challenges surrounding Biden’s $1.3 trillion infrastructure bill. Christian Shelton reports.
Infrastructure funding: for the last few decades consecutive US presidents have talked about it but none have delivered… until now. With Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act being made law in November 2021, $1.3 trillion has now been pledged to multiple areas of America’s crumbling infrastructure. Biden claims it will, “create millions of jobs, turn the climate crisis into an opportunity, and put us on a path to win the economic competition for the 21st Century.” Covering all areas of US
infrastructure, from roads and bridges to water and internet, the bill promises economic stimulus not seen since FDR’s New Deal spend after the Great Depression. “We certainly support the bill on the economic stimulus front,” starts Chris Smith, VP Transportation at SC&RA. “More money for highway construction, for example, translates into more business and opportunities for our members.” Before we delve into the details
surrounding this money, though, we need to start by looking at the fundamentals of how infrastructure is funded in the USA to understand the opportunities, and challenges, arising from the infrastructure bill.
20 CRANES TODAY
FUNDING FUNDAMENTALS In the USA some money for infrastructure projects comes from federal government, controlled by Congress, while the rest comes from either states and local governments or private companies. This differs from the system in Europe where infrastructure is primarily funded by national governments. Federal funding in the States
peaked in 1933 with FDK’s New Deal, which many economists claim led to the country then enjoying economic success over the following years. There have been a few spikes
in federal funding since then, the Interstate Highway era in the late 1950s being one such example. Since the 1980s, however, infrastructure spend has made up less and less of federal funding, leaving state and local governments struggling to cover more of the costs and maintenance themselves. Today only a quarter of all public
infrastructure spend comes from federal government, says the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, and on a global level the USA is falling behind infrastructure investment levels compared to other countries.
HIGHWAY FUNDING When it comes to highways in particular, though, the implications of the bill become less
straightforward as the importance of federal funding varies between states. “We have a federally- funded but state-owned and state- operated highway system where the states rely on federal money to fund the expansion, construction, expansion, maintenance and operation of not only the Interstate Highway system but the other highways they have built over the last 100 years,” outlines Smith. “The states have a lot of discretion on how to spend this money, plus that federal funding, depending on what state you're in, is either very important and a huge source of highway funding or a very small part of highway funding, as they otherwise rely on their own taxes and tolls. So across all 50 states you've got 50 different opinions on how that federal money should be spent.”
SHUT DOWNS Another key point of the bill is to do with what Congress calls ‘authorization’. “This goes back to the core separation of power,” explains Smith. “Congress is authorising the executive branch, in this case the Department of Transportation (DoT), to spend certain amounts of money on certain things for certain amounts of time. Over the last 20-30
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