Fix This: Infrastructure & Environment | Gregg Hurwitz and Rick Geddes | EP 207

It seems like we can get very little same discussion in mainstream media about the role, for instance, that regulation plays and how to strike the balance. And you're so clear about it, you know, of course we need to, you know, protect the environment. Of course we care about, you know, species, and extinction, and disruptions to the habitat. But we also can't take six years to build an overpass in New York City. It's just not going to be functional and not retain an economy that simultaneously serves the needs of the people who are less well-off because they're the ones who will pay the price for those delays fundamentally.

Absolutely. Another way of saying that, Jordan, is all these delays and costs, it's like a regressive tax, right? In other words, right, it's a tax economists would think about as an implicit tax that disproportionately hurts the poor.

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Hi everybody, I'm very pleased today to have with me two people: Dr. Rick Gettys. It's the timing is really perfect because the Biden infrastructure bill just passed, and Dr. Gettys is an expert on infrastructure development. It's exactly a propitious time to have this conversation about the details associated with infrastructure, what it is, how it might be renewed, and what obstacles there are, and so forth. He's a well-recognized expert in this particular area. He holds a joint appointment in both the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy and in the Economics Department at Cornell. He's a member of the graduate fields of Systems Engineering, Regional Science, and Economics. He's founding director of the Cornell Program in Infrastructure Policy. He's also a non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. I suppose that puts him somewhat to the right of center, and that's relevant for reasons we'll find out later. Rick's research centers on the funding, financing, and permitting of major infrastructure projects. His publications have appeared in a variety of academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, among others.

He's author of the 2011 American Enterprise Institute book entitled "The Road to Renewal: Private Investment in U.S. Transportation Infrastructure." He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in economics and finance from Towson State University.

And I also have with me as a co-host today, Greg Hurwitz. Greg was a student of mine at Harvard years ago, and we've remained in close touch ever since. He's the New York Times number one international best-selling author of 23 thrillers, including the Orphan X series. His novels have won numerous literary awards and have been published in 33 languages. Greg was a guest on this podcast in Season Four, Episode Two, in an episode entitled "Build a Better Democrat." He sits, I would say, center-left, and so we have two viewpoints.

I don't exactly know where I sit, and many people have many opinions about that. But Greg is also interested in policy development, and is influential in his views, are influential on the center-left, let's put it that way. We spent a lot of time discussing practical issues, including what might political parties concentrate on reasonably intelligently to pull the discussion back to the moderate and productive center.

We figured that infrastructure was definitely at least, in principle, one of those things that might be regarded as non-objectionable and useful by people on both sides of the political spectrum, assuming that they're not so extreme that you can't just talk to them at all.

So I invited Greg today for the same reason that I invited Dr. Gettys. I hope to learn something about infrastructure development from someone who spent his whole life studying it, and Greg's here for exactly the same reason.

So thank you very much, Dr. Gettys, for agreeing to talk to us today, and I'm looking forward to it.

So how did you get interested in, like, why infrastructure for you? And maybe you can lay out what it is, as far as you're concerned, why it's so crucial, and what also got you interested in it.

Yeah, so thank you, Jordan. I'm very honored to be invited to join the show, and excited people are talking about infrastructure, particularly with a policy event. I have to go way back in time, Jordan—I wrote a paper on the U.S. Postal Service back in college at Towson State, now Towson University in Baltimore, and got interested in economics in college and attended graduate school for my master’s—that must have made you possible popular with the girls, hey?

That concentrates, yeah, just really popular with them. But I wrote my dissertation back in Chicago on the regulation of electricity companies, investor-owned electricity companies. So I was always interested in regulation of industry and ended up sort of writing in the area of electric utility regulation and ownership—different ownership forms to deliver electricity—and circled back on the Postal Service in fact. And I talked to Fordham in the Bronx before coming to Cornell, and my work at Fordham focused on postal policy around the world and postal regulation.

And then, Jordan, in the 2004-05 academic year, if we can go back that far, I was invited to join the Council of Economic Advisors in the White House as a senior economist, what's called a senior economist. And that year was precipitous for infrastructure policy because Congress was passing a highway reauthorization bill, and that's actually important for what just happened in Congress now.

What happens is every five or six years, Congress reauthorizes spending out of the federal highway trust fund. So every time you buy a gallon of gasoline in the United States, 18.4 cents goes to the federal government. If you buy diesel fuel, it's 24.4 cents, and Congress just kind of stores that up in the highway trust fund until it reauthorizes spending out to the states every five or six years. So that year, 2004-05 was the SAFETEA-LU that was the name of the bill, the SAFETEA-LU Highway Bill.

And the executive branch was asked to weigh in at a whole set of issues related to highways, roads, bridges, tunnels, and it included things like environmental permitting, tolling of the interstate highway system or of other roads, public-private partnerships or private investment in infrastructure—which is the topic I wrote the book on—that you have because, you know, the executive branch is being hit with all sorts of policy issues as a result of that.

Jordan, President George W. Bush invited me to be a member of a commission that was created in the SAFETEA-LU Highway Bill. We called ourselves the Section 1909 commission because that was the section. It was literally called the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission because the federal highway program turned very interesting in the United States, started by President Eisenhower back in ’56, greatly increased the federal gas tax to pay for the design and construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System, but by the ’90s it was largely complete.

But the point was, you know, they’re still collecting the gas and diesel fuel taxes, and what's the point of the program if you, you know, basically have a complete system? So the purpose of this commission was to kind of study that question, and I got exposed to even more of these issues, Jordan, by serving on that commission. We put out a report to Congress called "Transportation for Tomorrow." I'm kind of laughing because it was put out in 2008 just as the global financial system was melting down, and we didn’t ever get the attention that we hoped. But we did have some impact, but Jordan, I came to realize the importance of these issues and how, in some sense, understudied they were, and in particular by economics departments.

Right back in my day in college, almost every economics department had a transportation economist, and that slowly went by the wayside, and the transportation policy issues really were not being studied.

How come it went by the wayside? I mean, in Canada, it was infrastructure that delivered this country. It was a railroad that tied us together. So infrastructure actually is at the basis of our country, and when I go down to the States and I see that that interstate highway system that was built between the ’50s and the ‘90s, that bloody thing's a miracle, and it's an economic miracle as well.

I don't think it could be built today. Maybe I'm cynical about that, but it could not.

Okay, why do you say that? Why could it not be built today, given how crucial that piece of infrastructure is?

Because one of the issues that we study, one of the things that I became interested in—we actually just put out a working paper a couple days ago through my CPIP program here at Cornell—is called NEPA, and that's the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which is a broad act where you have to file an environmental impact statement, an EIS, in order to design and construct a new facility, expand an old facility, do almost anything.

And part of the reason why I say that, Jordan, is because the NEPA process has become much larger to the point where it can slow down projects routinely for a decade, right? I think the average might be five we have in our research paper.

So let me push you on that, and maybe Greg can jump in here too. So now the Biden administration has decided to make infrastructure renovation and renewal one of its primary focuses. We were—Greg and I were both talking to a Republican congressman a while back and asked him what impediments he might see to its implementation, and he raised the same issue that you just described, which is that the red tape surrounding infrastructure renewal is now so dense that it's not obvious what can actually be done.

And so this actually puts the people who say on the center-left in somewhat of a conundrum because on the one hand, they want to build infrastructure not least to serve the interests of the poor and the working class, absolutely, because the rich can't take infrastructure for themselves, let's say. But if the regulatory structure is such that these projects are actually not practically implementable, well, is that a reasonable criticism that you're levying now? Is it reasonable to place you politically on the moderate right, let's say? And how does that influence your thinking about such things?

I mean, Jordan, I come from a classical liberal, libertarian, Scottish Enlightenment, neo-classical economics. I have my doctorate from Chicago, right? One of the golden eras, I would say, of Chicago economics. I guess you could place me, you know, wherever you want given that information.

But yeah, I take a basic market-oriented approach. I mean, I wrote a book on increased private participation in the delivery of public services, which is a huge issue globally, right? How the private sector that has capital, that has technology, that has management expertise, that has experience around the world can help to deliver what are fundamentally public goods and services.

So I think it's fair to put me slightly affiliated with American enterprise, slightly to the right of the center on this. But I do want to go back to this drawing because I think it's a really interesting point that people should be aware of.

So you've heard the adage that time is money, right? Time is money. That is really true in infrastructure. If you delay a project by five or seven years because of the NEPA process, right, then you just increase the cost enormously. I mean, it could double the cost or something of that nature.

And so what's happening now, it's actually very interesting—I think you'll find this very interesting—during the Trump administration, there were folks in the White House who suggested a new model for NEPA, and it's called the one federal decision, right? One federal decision. And that is the idea that you would have a lead federal agency.

So you wouldn't have the Environmental Protection Agency and you'd have Native American burial grounds, and you might have some other—all these different agencies that have to weigh in for project approval. One agency would take the lead in shepherding the environmental proposal right through the federal process.

And that agency could actually, if the other agencies were dragging their feet, would have the power basically to make a decision for them. The situation now, Jordan, is one agency will head it off, hand the proposal off to another, and that'll hand it off to another, and off to another, and as you can see, it slows down the process enormously.

And I believe that in the bill that was signed by—or voted on by the House late on Friday night, the one federal decision language is in the bill, right? But on the other hand, there's folks within the Biden administration who are trying to walk back some of the Trump era reforms with regard to expediting the environmental impact statement process, right?

So I think we all want to protect the environment. We all want to protect endangered species. We want to protect the water, the air, Native American burial grounds, you know, and so on, but there has to be some limit on how much time can be spent, you know, on these things before you either say yes or no, basically.

So there's a bit of polls. Things are being pulled in two different directions with the bill basically saying we're going to do one federal decision, and that's going to be a big reform of the NEPA process that policy people like me love.

And then there's another pull within the administration to kind of repeal some of the Trump era reforms on this. So one of the big things we would like to see is some sys—it hasn't really been reformed since 1970, which is a long time ago.

And there's, as you know, Jordan, an ecosystem of lawyers and consultants, etc. in Washington that have built up around the NEPA process, and they—you know, that whole thing slows it down. So that would be one sort of major reform that we think would expedite infrastructure delivery in the United States, speed it up, and essentially do it at a lower cost.

And so, you know, we're hopeful that that's when the president signs the bill, that that'll be, you know, part of it, and we'll see some changes. But in answer to your original question, Jordan, I think things are so cumbersome at this stage that you could never build the interstate highway system in the United States today the way you did in the ’50s and ’60s.

Yeah, so the Chinese announced 150 nuclear plants today, I think today or yesterday.

Wow, yeah, that's their plan. And so, Greg, you had a question?

Well, I was thinking, you know, one of the things Jordan and I talk about sometimes is the aim that we strive for in our mutual work is to try and get people arguing and talking about the right things at least, right?

Versus how so much conversation goes, and I was really struck by even something that's as seemingly uncontroversial as infrastructure—there's very little discussion in the media, in conversations around this topic with any sophistication. Like even something like infrastructure, to me, has been pushed into such sort of gridlock that any discussion of regulation from the left is viewed as, you know, corporations trying to roll back stuff so they can dump toxins into oceans and make more profit rather than being able to be framed and described as you're doing.

Everybody has an intuitive sense of that. Anyone who's ever done a remodel or had a home project, everyone knows the cost and the expense of anything that takes longer and how onerous that is and how many different layers.

And, you know, part of what the—from the messaging perspective is how do we, you know, yet again, it's another example about how the working class, small businesses, and the poor are being held hostage by a messaging apparatus from both sides that has sort of distilled the argument into sort of tribal warfare on either side.

It seems like we can get very little same discussion in mainstream media about the role, for instance, that regulation plays and how to strike the balance. And you're so clear about it, you know, of course we need to, you know, protect the environment. Of course, we care about, you know, species, and extinction, and disruptions to the habitat. But we also can't take six years to build an overpass in New York City.

It's just not going to be functional and not retain an economy that simultaneously serves the needs of the people who are less well-off because they're the ones who will pay the price for those delays fundamentally.

Absolutely. Another way of saying that, Jordan, is all these delays and costs, it's like a regressive tax. Right? In other words, right, it's a tax economists would think about as an implicit tax that disproportionately hurts the poor, you know.

Okay, why did this occur? Why does that disproportionately hurt the poor?

Well, I mean, these facilities, you know, let's go back and talk about the actual facilities, you know, the actual infrastructure, right, that we're talking about. As I stress, it provides basic public goods and services.

So mobility—getting to school, getting to your work, you know, getting to your community activities, right? The history of infrastructures—and this goes 200 years back, in the U.S. Postal Service—is the history of trying to provide all communities with access, right, or being sure that no communities are left out.

That goes back to the horse post, right, when you were delivering letters and cards and newspapers by horse. And the goal in the United States was that all communities should have access to a post office, right?

And the history of infrastructure in the United States—universal landline telephones, there was a farms-to-markets movement where we tried to pave rural roads because farmers couldn't get their harvest to the market, you know, in time on dirt roads that were full of mud. So there was this farms-to-markets. There was electrification during the Roosevelt year, rural electrification.

So there's always this, and we see it now with broadband, right? Now is broadband access consistently in our polling. We go out often into the 37 congressional districts decided by five points. We really want to see what people think to cut through it, and consistently rural broadband tests through the roof as a necessity, right?

It is the new—those are the new information highways, right? It is the new infrastructure system, and we see a huge demand need for that.

Well, and think of all the educational opportunities that provides as well and increasingly so.

And so, okay, so let me ask you another kind of technical question, please go ahead.

The universal access—and that includes the poorest communities, right? Rural communities, poor urban communities—it's always been across sectors this goal of everybody having access, and that's fundamentally what the infrastructure is about.

Okay, so do you think—so here's a proposition, a twofold proposition: the most important thing that might be done to rectify absolute poverty and maybe to mitigate relative poverty would be the provision of energy as cheaply as possible. And the second most important would be the universal provision of efficient infrastructure.

Is that a reasonable prop—are those propositions reasonable from the perspective of an economist?

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely crucial. But I would say that the energy infrastructure, the energy is part of the infrastructure—the generating, distribution, and transmission capacity you need to get power, right, to people.

That’s crucial. We kind of—the extension of that is we don't like to live in a society where some communities are systematically—don't have these things, right? We kind of think everybody should have heat, everybody should have electric, everybody should have mobility, right, in your community.

So I would say, absolutely, you know, and that's why having these things, there's this big notion of equity, right, which is kind of this amorphous term, and some of us are bothered by the lack of definition, but in infrastructure, it is used generally, I think, it's this old notion of universal service, universal access, where all—it's equitable for all communities to have this.

And of course, I consider myself to be an old-time regulatory economist and I'm always harping on how these issues have been studied for a century or longer in the— you know, to provide these basic services as the technology evolves.

And now, of course, with this Zoom call, we know how important broadband internet access is, and kids need to have it for school, and people need to have it for work, and so we don't want either urban pockets to be left without it, you know, or rural.

So, Jordan, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but there's a certain level of power that we need.

Well, the other thing that I've thought a lot about is Pareto distribution problems. And so, you know, the fact that money, for example, does tend to end up in the hands of fewer and fewer people, you have to fight very hard to not have that happen.

But that doesn't seem to me to be the case with infrastructure because, well, it can't happen that way. You can't hoard the highways, you can't hoard the electrical grid, and even if you did, it wouldn't do you any good.

And so if you are actually devoted to serving those who are oppressed and excluded at the bottom of the socioeconomic and power hierarchies, then I can't think of a way to facilitate equitable distribution of valuable resources, especially energy, because energy is work.

I can't think of a better way of doing that than to concentrate on infrastructure development. And so then that brings us to the next problem that's going to be a big one for this infrastructure bill, is like as pressure ramps up in relationship to climate change and the environmental concerns that go along with that, there's going to be more and more pressure on infrastructure development, like to—in terms of regulating and suppressing it, for that matter.

And so that's a real tension on the left, I think, because the left tends to be more concerned, let's say, with broad-scale environmental issues, but theoretically also they're concerned with the poor, and there's a big tension there.

And so do you have some sense of how those mutual goals might be brought into alignment with one another, instead of acting in an antagonistic manner?

So, Jordan, I think you've hit on one of the most important and under-appreciated issues in infrastructure policy, and I kind of regret that I didn't spend more time in my book that you have on this.

But I've been studying this for 15 years now, and I would say there's been a slow revolution going on in the technology of infrastructure delivery, right? And some of those things make, you know, the front page of the New York Times, and that’s driverless cars, right, and the hyperloop and things like that.

But there's a whole host of other technologies that have been developed in the universities, in the labs, and the startups that stand to transform the way infrastructure delivery is operated and delivered in the United States.

Let me give you a couple examples. One is smart stoplights, okay? Smart stoplights. I had a kind of a little briefing of this by the folks at Carnegie Mellon recently. And it's a stoplight, right, with different colors, but it has a camera and a sensor attached to it so that the lights are not just on a rope timer.

They actually change in response to the traffic that's actually at the intersection. So many drivers have had the experience of going to a red light, and because they’re good people, they stop and wait there, and there's no traffic in the other direction, and they just know that if the light knew that I was sitting there, it would turn green.

What turns out, the technology has existed for a decade to sense the cars actually at the intersection and change the lights optimally in response to the traffic at the intersection.

Jordan, they have it now to the point where they can sense pedestrians and include pedestrians in the changing of the light. They can tell a dog. They can tell a person in a wheelchair, and they can just change the—optimize the changing of the colors to maximize the flow through the intersection.

Now stop and think for a minute how much gasoline you would save if you did that! How much fuel, how much frustration, how much time, how much patience!

We just had smart stoplights. Now there's something in the bill that's a pilot program to help with that, right? But the problem, Jordan, is not the technology. The problem is the adoption, right?

It's getting the people who own the stoplights, you might be a small town like where I am in Ithaca, or it could be, you know, a county. It could be a city, but it's highly atomized in the United States. But getting them to overcome their risk aversion, and I understand that totally; they're risk-averse to new technologies.

They're afraid of it. They don't—what we call headline risk. You're the mayor, and you're afraid you’re going to wake up tomorrow and find that there’s been a giant crash because these stoplights malfunctioned, right?

But we’ve got to somehow overcome that risk aversion to get them to adopt these new technologies.

Okay, well, so one of the things you’re saying is that part of the infrastructure messaging—and I don't mean messaging in the cynical way, you know, because I would hope that the messaging is actually associated with the underlying policies, so it's a straight game.

But if infrastructure development means replacing inefficient use of resources with efficient use of resources, that should be a net gain on the economic side for poor people, plus it should have environmental benefits.

So yes, we shouldn’t be thinking about it exactly, okay.

Okay, okay.

So how about priorities? Like you give the highway systems in this book, for example, in the U.S. I think it's a D and the bridges a C minus, and then that's American Society of Civil Engineers, right?

So if you were going to rank order infrastructure priorities in the United States, I know that's a big task, but you've thought about this for a long time. Like what's really broken? Where's the biggest bang for the buck?

So, Jordan, wow, that is a great question. You know, the American Society of Civil Engineers has done a great job of pointing to the inadequate, the deferred maintenance, right, in the United States.

So the bottom line is I think the U.S. has done a good job of designing and constructing and building out new networks to ensure that all communities are connected, right? The interstate highway system, the state routes, the local streets, you know, in infrastructure—same thing across, you know, across sectors.

But we've done a very—so we're good at building shiny new things, but we're very poor at taking care of what we have already. And I think there are political incentives, right? If you want to be re-elected, you want the ribbon-cutting ceremony with the big scissors, right?

But it doesn’t get you re-elected if you say we put five millimeters of asphalt on that bridge over there, even though the civil engineers are telling you you need to resurface that bridge.

So there’s a problem with the political incentives that have led to these trillions of dollars, you know, of deferred maintenance. And I think in the bill—so of course that’s part of the debt—that’s part of the debt that differed maintenance.

Even that's also part of this part—that's also part of messaging failure. You know, as you're describing the stoplights, and that's like the Sin City stuff, right? You can plug in car—like the stoplights also have so many other aspects, as charging stations and different security—they can alert to gun shots; like there's so much in it that's efficient.

And to me, I just hear that as a—you know, obviously being somebody who's more involved with the messaging side of it. But that seems to me to get somewhere like Ithaca to adopt that. It has to be framed as an environmental imperative, like you want to cut gasoline costs, here’s how we do it, here’s how the city is cleaner, here’s where the money will scoot other people.

There’s a way that that has to be packaged and sold that's outside of the norm, right? I think the thing that we see increasingly is that we—the way that the information moves now and polarizes and is sold, we expect politicians to also have to figure out how to be TikTok stars, that they know exactly how to sell everything in some magical fashion.

And the lack of a proper messaging apparatus around some of this stuff is really costly, and people tend to forget that that's just as essential as figuring out the problems. If you can't sell them and communicate to people in real concrete terms the ways it will affect their lives, in their communities, it doesn't get adopted.

Right? So that’s also an infrastructure problem in some sense, right? And no non-trivial one at that.

So how do you make these things sexy? I made a joke about that at the beginning, you know, that these tend to be regarded as dry discussions, but they’re not. They’re the real details of actual policy, the real details of actual politics.

And what we’re laying out here at the moment is a vision that’s something like, well, how does enhanced efficiency—like, why is that a problem for anyone? Well, it’s more efficient.

Go ahead.

No, real quick, also this is where ideologies, and by that I don’t just mean far left and far right, I also mean like classically conservative and classically liberal—this is where they come to die, in a good way, in the solution of a problem.

Like, if we can have this conversation about specifically how this makes people’s lives better, maybe that’s a solution that’s 70% conservative, 30% liberal when it comes to some application, maybe.

And so what’s so important about boiling them down to this and figuring out how to talk about it is a lot of the useless ideological overlay to specific problems that concretely help the working class and the poor and actually make headway for community environment.

And that’s also, you know, clean fields and streams. We’re not just talking global warming; we’re talking about literal the communities that people live in, that they fish in, that small businesses are run in.

You know, that’s where all the rubber meets the road.

And then, Greg, it might be a rule of thumb that if the discussion is occurring at a level where all that’s happening is ideological argument, then the problem actually hasn’t been specified clearly enough to move towards solution, right?

It might be a good feeling.

Well, then you also see it in your way, right? Is it bureaucrats? Is it businesses that are legitimately looking to override regulation for ill motivation?

If we could—if once it gets boiled down, it also—you get a very clear lay of what the strategic field looks like for pushing something through.

So, Jordan, I want to address your—just a few minutes ago you said, who could be against greater efficiency, right? And I think this in some sense—the greats point should be the ultimate bipartisan issue, right? I’m not sure, with all due respect, I’m not sure engineers are the greatest on the messaging piece of this.

I love them to death, but there is this issue. So let me give you two other examples I want to get off my chest. And you know, there ain't saying there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, but the closest thing to a free lunch in economics is technological adoption, right?

So one great example I think is completely underappreciated, you know, we’re all concerned about climate change and its methane emissions at wastewater treatment plants, right?

So a lot of wastewater treatment plants, particularly in the eastern United States, are old. Ours here in Ithaca was over 100 years old, and they’re open settling ponds for solid waste. Well, guess what happens? The methane from that process just goes into the atmosphere, which is a very bad greenhouse gas.

So what you can do, and what the city of Ithaca did, where we are—the mayor is a Cornell graduate—was partner with a private company, in this case it’s Johnson Controls, to install a digester. And I’ve had the tour—the digester looks like a giant tennis ball; it’s a big white sphere with a plunger.

They capture the methane from the natural process of breaking down the solids. They use the methane to turn turbines that Johnson Control installed. Three of them at 120,000 rpms—they're very, very efficient; they're making electricity.

They capture the methane so it doesn’t go into the atmosphere; it doesn’t cause climate change. They instead use that to create electricity, so they offset other generating sources.

Now our wastewater treatment plant sells power to the grid instead of using power from the grid to run the plant. They sell power to the grid. It’s a win-win-win, right? To the point where they're going to—since I believe they're going to install another digester, and they’re actually taking waste from other surrounding communities to process here, right?

They charge something called a tipping fee, right? The city doesn’t do that for free; they do that for a charge.

And so this—I don’t know if it’s a messaging or a—I don’t know what it is, but—

Well, who’s really good at messaging? Corporations, right? They’re really good at it. You can turn on the TV and look at what ExxonMobil does, right?

And so it’s really interesting because in a certain way, as you lay it out, if there’s a for-profit aspect to this from private industry that benefits cities at no cost to get something in place that also earns cities money, it seems to me like that's a perfect union for private and public interface.

And so somebody—it seems to me like the most immediate driver for that would be for the private corporation to figure out how to package and sell that to other cities.

That’s a bigger driver to me, I think, than trying to convince layers of bureaucracy and governments why this makes sense and to adopt it through, you know, city boards or councils or however that works.

Well, I would presume that’s also partly why in your book, "The Road to Renewal," that you also stress the utility of public-private joint ventures.

And so maybe we could go into that.

Okay, so here’s a couple of things we’ve sketched out: Well, let’s go for efficiency because that’s going to serve us on the environmental front. But it’s also going to be economically efficient, and then we could also point out that there’s a big argument always going on ideologically, in some sense, between Malthusian biologists and enthusiastic economists.

And the Malthusian biologists insist, with limits to growth, that everything has a maximal carrying capacity; we can’t exceed that, and there are Malthusian catastrophes.

But the economists come in and say, yeah, well, wait a minute; one of the ways that we can solve that is by doing more with less, and we're really good at that. And we're getting faster and faster at being better and better at it.

And I think the economists—I would say my way of thinking—the economists are the optimists, and I think they have the upper hand in the argument. But this is a perfect marriage of those two things, in some sense, because it means that the optimal infrastructure plans please both sides.

It’s like, yeah, this is going to be better for the environment, plus it will make poor people wealthier, right? So how is that not exactly what we should be aiming for?

And then, well, the messaging issue—well, that's a pretty easy message to sell, especially if it's true.

And so let’s go into the public-private issue a bit. Can I give—can I get—I want to give you guys a third example before we go to the public-private just attack because this, Jordan, gets directly to the point you just made, right?

I emphasized stop lights before. Now I’m going to emphasize street lights. Right? On parking lots, you have the—for roads where you have the street—to illuminate the thing at night. The thing now—that’s the methane capture equivalent for street lights.

We talked about stoplights; this is LED conversions. So if you fly over a parking lot in your plane at night, you see this yellowish color from the bulbs, this old pressurized sodium incandescent technology—it’s very old.

LEDs and street lights are so much more efficient that you can, again, you can install the bulbs, you can install the new towers, and you can do it at virtually no cost to the city by the savings on the electric bill.

But they’re so much more efficient that you get more lumens, right? You get more brightness, and this was done in the city of Detroit, I believe that Paris did this, but think about the effects of that, right?

You have more brightness that reduces crime, that reduces pedestrian accidents, that reduces car accidents at night. This helps communities at almost no cost to the jurisdiction that is installing them.

And you can do other things, like you can hang 5G what they call pizza boxes—those are 5G transmitters on those towers, and you start to deliver higher-speed internet at the same time you’re improving the lighting.

So there’s all these innovations that are completely underappreciated in this debate, and I have to say I’m somewhat frustrated that there’s not more focus on these opportunities.

So that in fact, I think the street lights is what I was thinking about for the charging of cars and other things rather than the stop lights, which was your earlier example.

But a quick question for you while we’re on specifics, which is you said that it’s Johnson Industries Controls—Johnson, I mean, it shows—I mean, so clearly they have an outreach business development office.

Like, what do you think the impediments are to them going and pitching this and just having explosive growth if in fact all of these things line out you’ve assessed them?

I think they can. I mean, that’s a really interesting question, Greg. The case in Ithaca, I’m pretty sure, is what we call an unsolicited proposal, right?

So it’s not like the city of Ithaca came and said, "Hey, we want somebody to do methane capture on our wastewater treatment plant." I’m pretty sure Johnson Controls studied the situation and approached the city and said, "You guys should do this."

One thing, again, is you know—it’s the United States, and it’s this, frankly, balkanized system of delivery in many sectors, and they’re a bit jealous of—they want local control, right?

And they’re a bit afraid, I think. They’re so small. A lot of these wastewater treatment systems are small. They’re afraid of a big company.

So it has to be done properly. I don’t really have a good answer to your question, Greg, but I think smart public policy—and this gets to Jordan’s point about public-private cooperation—how can we do that better, right?

Smart public would encourage this. Encourage this.

Okay, well, some of it is a matter of decreasing distrust, you know? I mean for a public-private partnership to work, the private sector has to trust the public sector, and the public sector has to trust the private sector.

And then for that to be marketable to the population at large, people have to believe that the institutions are fundamentally sound, and that would mean the governmental institutions, which the left tends to take for granted as being sound—not always.

It depends on who’s in power—but also the private institutions, which the right tends to take for granted as sound. But there isn’t any reason that we couldn’t reconfigure our beliefs, at least to some degree, and think, "Well, look, we could unite in the pursuit of efficiency and environmental cleanliness," right?

It’s like, what the hell’s the problem with that?

And one of the things that’s quite disturbing to me when I look at the United States is when I travel from Canada to the United States, I’m always happy to be in the States. I go to New York City, and I look at—I was in Manhattan this week, and I think this bloody place is—it's such a miracle.

Like there’s seven million people there crammed onto this island, and it’s clean! Like it’s actually clean! How do you do this? This is impossible!

It’s such a bloody miracle, and then I see the country like rivening it itself apart and tearing itself apart with its ideological struggles and not noticing that it’s really pretty damn good, and your institutions work remarkably well.

And like, what’s all the paranoia about, folks? That’s a great thing.

And, well, those are discussions that Greg and I have had on other issues.

And so this issue of trust, Greg, seems to me to be central to this in part—it's like, and also the provision of something like an optimistic vision, which would be, well, we don’t have to—it’s not limits to growth, it’s not the Rome Club in 1968 saying we’re going to be overpopulated by the year 2000 and we’ve got to shut all this down.

It’s like, no, we can solve the environmental problem and we can solve the economic problem, and if we do them properly, we’re going to solve both better and faster.

Yes, and I think that’s actually realistic. Yes, it’s happening in certain cases.

I mean I’m giving you examples of where all these technologies are being—it’s not a—there’s no silver bullet; it’s not, this is the real world, but it’s, it’s a win-win-win, and it needs to happen.

Let me say something, Jordan and Greg, I just love your reactions. So I’ve been studying the infrastructure delivery around the world, and I’m pretty sure that in developed countries and many developing countries, the United States is dead last in public-private cooperation.

If you go to France, they have an office of partnerships—the French word for that—in Paris that automatically assumes that the public and private sector will come together to deliver the infrastructure.

Jordan, the way the canals in France were delivered in the 17th century was through a pub—that was the way you moved freight back then. It was through a public-private partnership. It was through a concession.

If you go to Canada, where you are, Canada is one of the world’s leaders in public-private partnerships. You guys have these what are called P3 units. Ontario has one; Quebec has one; you know, I could just go on, and then there’s a national one, and it’s all to facilitate public-private cooperation.

I spent a year on sabbatical in Australia as a Fulbright Scholar to study their infrastructure delivery. Every state in Australia—New South Wales, Queensland—you know, go on—they all have an office of a PPP unit or an office of partnerships, and then they have a federal one that’s called Infrastructure Australia to facilitate public-private cooperation.

And the United States, the two sides are just completely suspicious of each other. But we’re supposed to be capitalists!

Do you think that’s because the general—and generally speaking, that liberals have distrust of private business and conservatives have distrust of government?

I mean, do you think those are the drivers of why?

Yeah, so Greg, that’s a really good question. I think there’s probably a book that—but here’s my quick answer. So the United States, you have to go then to the financing of infrastructure—this—it sounds opaque, but this is one of the most, I think, important issues, and I’ll get to the details.

The United States—I’ve talked to people around the world—is the only country I’m aware of that has this tax treatment of publicly issued debt, all right?

So that’s tax-exempt municipal bonds, right? So what that means is, if you’re the bondholder, you buy the bonds, you do not pay federal tax on the income.

Okay? Now think of what that does. So if you’re the issuer, say you’re the city of Ithaca, and you’re the mayor, and you issue bonds to pay for a new bridge, and you have to issue $100 million of bonds, you get a lower interest rate because they’re tax-exempt municipal bonds, right?

So this pushes infrastructure delivery in the United States away from public-private partnerships, right?

And this is now a multi-trillion dollar market that pushes it away from public-private partnerships and towards public sector-only delivery.

Do you think there’s any possibility that that could be modified, or is that an impossible task?

So Jordan, that is a multi-trillion dollar financial market on Wall Street now. The political forces that are going to protect, you know, are going to protect that tax exemption are very strong. But it’s in the bill, Jordan, what they have, the TR—the people in Washington have recognized this problem we call it an unlevel cost of capital playing field, where the tax treatment artificially lowers—hold on a second, sorry—the tax treatment artificially lowers the cost of capital, meaning the cost of money, right?

If it’s a tax-exempt municipal bond that’s not issued by a private company, right?

So in the bill, they have something called private activity bonds or PABs, and what that does is it extends that tax exemption to privately issued debt through a PPP.

Now, now I could go into the details. What did you call that? What was it?

Private activity bond.

PABs, private activity bonds. Please do not confuse it with a BAB, which is a Build America Bond; it’s different. The real action is in the PABs, the private activity bonds.

The United States Treasury is jealous of the public fisk, right? And so they don’t like to give tax exemptions. So the old law was $15 billion cap, right? The total amount of issuance of PABs was $15 billion.

Jordan, the new bill would double it to $30 billion. So people like us say that’s great; it’s not enough, but the 50—they hit the $15 billion cap—the PABs were so popular, at least the bill doubles it, right?

And we would like to see it—it's only for transportation, I think—we would like to see PABs, the cap on PABs increased and also to use it for other things like water or power, whatever those things are.

But economists do not like to see economic decisions distorted by tax law, right? And I'm getting to Craig's point, I think.

I think the United States is kind of behind this because it's so easy to just use taxes on municipal bonds if you're a public owner of infrastructure and to say, “Heck with the PPP, right? You guys are going to have taxable debt that’s going to cost me more. I’m just going to go with tax-exempt muni debt.”

So it’s this odd thing that has caused, you know, supposedly free enterprise America to be kind of adverse to private cooperation and infrastructure delivery.

Is that why you think that it’s almost like the larger forces, the foundational forces are skewed from this tax perspective? And so for something to break through, it’s got to be wildly innovative and immediately profit-driven, like the example with Johnson—the methane, right?

It has to be something that’s so innovative and so tip of the arrow that it can offer a solution that doesn’t rely on the bigger sort of capital raise with the tax ramifications.

And so if there’s stuff that’s in between—if there’s stuff that requires a bigger investment of capital upfront, it seems like that’s where it will get caught versus a situation like that where a private company can come in hard in exchange for a forever share of a percentage of profit, which makes it worthwhile.

No, I think that’s right, Greg. And I’m not—I want to be clear; I’m not faulting the public owners—you know, the mayors.

I think it’s mostly the mayors. It could be county executives or governors, but really it seems like the mayors are the people who are dealing with most of this. And I’ve heard stories, Greg, where they’ll be—they have to do a new project, right? They have to finance it.

They will have two groups coming from the same bank, from the same bank; the one group is pushing tax-exempt municipal bonds, and the other group is pushing public-private partnerships. And the mayor just says, “Look, my interest payments, my service on the debt is going to be a lot lower with the tax-exempt municipal bond group, so I’m going to do that.”

You know, and it’s almost like a fiscal—it’s like a fiscal.

Okay, so why is that? Okay, why is that bad, though? Let’s go into that because if he’s saving money doing that and the project is going to go ahead anyways, then why not take that route? What’s the cost of not rectifying this?

So, Jordan, the cost is it crowds out private participation because the private folks cannot compete—a lot of these things are levered, you know; it’s 80% that 20% equity, and they can’t—they just cannot compete with this artificially low cost of capital.

And you know, what's the problem—what's the problem with leaving? Okay, so what's the problem with just leaving it in the hands of the government?

Now we talked about messaging, right? So what’s the problem there exactly?

So, Jordan, you don’t get the innovation. You don’t get—you don’t get the risk-bearing benefits of including the private partners. One, they’re good at risk management. You do not get the new technologies. The other thing I should have harped on more in that book is what’s called the lifecycle asset maintenance.

And that means if you do a PPP, you wrap the design and construction in with the operation over maybe 25 or 30 years. So that means the contract requires the public owner to keep the infrastructure up, right?

And this is one of the things that I harp—the United States, last time I checked, is a relatively wealthy country. Why is our infrastructure degraded? It’s because we haven’t done the operation and maintenance over the life of the facility the way the civil engineers told you to.

So it’s called a DBOM. So the incentives are wrong. I mean, what that means is fundamentally these incentives are wrong, right?

So they're all screwed up. I mean, I have said in every venue I can to do to wrap those things together—a bundle—that the term is to bundle design and construction.

That could be renovation, but bundle it in with O&M—with operation and maintenance—and the poor bless their hearts.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—you mentioned New York—have the authority to do this on their own. The new Goethals bridge, I’ve had a tour. It’s a hundred-year bridge that’s built to last a hundred years—beautiful bridge.

It’s a DBOM; it’s a design-build-operate-maintain contract over 25 or 30 years. I forget the exact, and there are other facilities.

I think maybe it’s the new LaGuardia terminal is a DBOM contract.

So, Jordan, what answer your question? That I think the tax community debt was very good for the United States in this developmental stage, but now it’s become a problem, right?

An albatross, in some sense, because it crowds out these private partnerships that the rest of the world—Canada is the leader; you know, the rest of the world has been using in spades—in terms of messaging.

One of the things you did in your book is you pointed to a lot of projects that were really radically successful.

And so I’m kind of imagining a messaging campaign where, you know, there’s some focus—like an ad, a focus on a project that really worked, and some discussion of why this worked, and what “work” means, you know?

It’s more efficient, it’s cheaper, it’s better for the environment, everybody wins—that’s pretty good.

And then to scaffold that upward to include larger and larger projects that have exactly the same sort of aim, it would be something like that.

But so would it be possible—because this book’s somewhat old—can you think of a number of projects you talked about, the methane capture system?

Are there projects that could be profitably assessed that have been radically successful, that work on all fronts, that could be used as detailed templates for messaging going forward with infrastructure development?

Would that be a good approach? Because it kind of ties the high to the low, right?

Absolutely, so yes. I mean—so one of the things—

I have research—you might appreciate in Nature, I’m very proud of that, because of the general interest readership of Nature and Science, right? With two great, great people, Peter Cranton, who actually—his father was dean of the law school here—he grew up in Ithaca—and Axel Oakenfelds, and Axel’s at the University of Cologne.

And the Nature paper lays down how road pricing, right, pricing the use of the road—which a pilot project is in the bill that was just signed by the House of Representatives—could help to alleviate and, in fact, eliminate traffic congestion.

But people don’t talk—oh my god, what would we do without traffic congestion?

Yeah, well, people spend like an hour a day in traffic congestion.

This is not a trivial problem; it’s an unbelievably economic drain, and it’s terribly polluting.

But, Jordan, look at what—what do they do? What’s the first thing that you hear when people say this road is congested?

They say, “Build another lane! Build another highway!” Right? And there’s economic research that shows it’s what’s called induced demand.

It is the fact that you have added a lane adds to the demand on the highway. The developer says, “Oh, there’s a new interstate highway here; I’m going to put a housing development in.”

Well, what does that do to the interstate highway? It adds to congestion. And so they’re always looking for these capacity expansions, or they’re looking for new and wild technologies, right?

I love the hyperloop, you know. They’re saying, “Let’s do a hyperloop.” But the economics 101, Jordan, the first semester of microeconomics provides the answer where the problem is that the price of the road space is zero, right?

It’s a free good. So it’s just like if you have a pile of free bananas and a pile of price bananas at the grocery store, people are going to take the free bananas and they’re going to be gone, right?

And so, so it’s an artificial free too, because it’s not free because people are paying for it with their time, and it’s the old Soviet system; it’s queuing.

Yeah, with a lot of these problems, systemically, I’m just trying to think through how this works.

You know, with people making decisions, I’m not as familiar with mayorship, though I’m somewhat, but I mean, so there are a couple of things.

We’re back to the age-old problem of term limits, right? Because if you’re making a choice on which tax—which is going to be more tax-efficient for your two years, four years, or whatever your term is, it’s going to make sense in the short term, but not in the long term.

And so to overcome that, people—mayors have to be armed with a whole different story that they’re able to tell and market and draw voters with, because under current circumstances—and you know, the other thing that I think about that I don’t think any one of us is going to have an answer to immediately, but I just thought I would raise it—that we’re seeing everywhere, I’m sure you see it in all of your ventures, is people are so busy scrambling to keep up with, I’m going to call it corruption.

And by that, I don’t mean overt corruption; I mean all the nonsense and clogging that goes into the act of being, let’s say, a politician, right?

The amount of just chasing can get—right? The congestion that there is no time to consider and to weigh things out in a way that involves bigger-picture innovative thinking.

So the easiest thing is to just pull the lever on what you’ve been doing all along, right?

And I’m seeing that a lot. What you’re saying to adopt new technology, to sell it, somebody has to really understand that. They have to go into it like the methane capture—they have to go into private business; they have to figure out what regulations need to be cleared to figure out how to package that and sell that.

And no one’s doing that.

And when congressmen are spending 25 hours a week fundraising because they have to, how the hell are they going to take the time to dig into something at this level of detail?

And that’s more like congestion than corruption, really, right?

It’s easy to be cynical about that, but it’s not helpful.

But also, nobody gets fired if you pull a lever on something everyone’s been doing for 50 years, 75 years.

Where you get hired is if you have—and you advocate for that partnership and it turns into a disaster.

And so there’s a lot of ways that people are risk-averse based on the system.

And I think, you know, for me, I hate to sound like, you know, a hammer where everything’s a nail, but you know, the only contribution really that I can offer that’s significant is on the storytelling front, which is messaging.

Which for me, messaging is distinct from propaganda. If you can get the messaging right, sometimes you can get the policy right.

Yeah, but Craig, let me say, you know, expand that a little bit, and this gets to Jordan’s point.

These are great, you know, great people; it’s been a joy to get involved in real infrastructure because these are people who actually care about whether the subways in New York work or the bus systems, you know, work, or the water’s clean, or if wastewater treatment plants are operational. I mean, they really do care, right?

And so for me, I get site visits; I get to see the stuff in construction. You can tell that they care. You can tell that they care because they’re paying attention to details that matter.

It’s real; it’s real.

It really matters if the sewage system works, and you think, “Well, that’s not that interesting; it’s kind of beneath me.” It’s like, of course the sewage system is beneath you—like obviously—but it’s a mark of caring to make those things work.

And everyone knows what it’s like to bring a plumber into your house who’s a good plumber.

Yep.

It’s like you’re so happy he’s there, it’s like great, and he’s got his business and it’s going fine, and he comes in, and he doesn’t rip you off on the bill, and he actually fixes it, and it’s not going to screw up again, and it’s a good interchange.

It’s a—you know, you’re happy to have someone like that in your house.

Absolutely.

And that’s the problem. The first time we bought a house, I feel like our trusted plumber was like part of the family—like figured out his favorite thing to drink at like cocktail hour at the end of the day.

I mean, he was in there; it’s unbelievable how reliant we are. Yeah, skilled tradespeople—working people who do their job well, it’s just—it’s unbelievable.

Yeah, but take that, Greg, and multiply it by ten, right? So one of our affiliates is Patrick Foy, who was the head of the New York—the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, but then he was made head of the MTA, and guess what happened? COVID hit, right?

The fare box revenues of the MTA in New York were down by like 90%.

And here’s a guy who’s been appointed by the governor to do that, and you know this is your moment to step up to the plate. You gotta—you gotta still pay your workers, you gotta keep the system running, but your fare box revenue just dropped by 90% because of the quarantine.

So think of that, right?

I couldn’t sleep; I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

But Patrick was able to take it through and pull it somehow, pull it out the other end, right, and manage all this crap that was going on on the New York City subway system, you know, partly because the virus—that's amazing.

I was stunned when I went to New York City to Manhattan. You know, it looked like it did five years ago, except it was cleaner. I thought, “How just think about this; that city was shut down for 18 months, and it still works.”

It’s like what the hell? That’s a miracle.

That’s an absolute miracle.

And if everyone was corrupt and power-seeking and malevolent and only out for themselves, that is not how that city would look at all.

No, and it is amazing given the level of activity and the density and the restaurants and the waste—it’s amazing.

It does work. But, you know, as I said, Jordan, at the outset, I come from this, you know, neoclassical free enterprise kind of perspective.

But the longer I’ve been dealing with infrastructure, the more respect and admiration I have for the public people who have, you know, are dedicating their careers to making this stuff work.

They really do have a public interest, you know, desire embedded in them, which is nice, right? It’s nice to see that, and they take their job—they could all make more money in the private sector probably, yeah, and be easier, you know?

And the rewards would be bigger, and there might be more security.

I mean, look, what Greg and I went to Washington four years ago, and one of the things we did was host a couple of lunches, and we had relatively junior Democrat congresspeople and Republican congresspeople just come to lunch because they don’t get a chance to meet each other, partly because they’re raising money 25 hours a week.

And then—and plus they’re up for re-election in two years like these are busy people, right?

And so the first thing we did was just had everybody introduce themselves and talk for five minutes. It was like, why are you doing this?

That was the question. And you could not tell the Democrats from the Republicans. Every story was the same. It was like, well, you know, I’m kind of a serious person, and I would really like to serve my country, and I felt that although I had other opportunities, that this was worth a sacrifice and I was hoping I could come to Washington and really make a difference, right?

Like you listen to eight people say that, and these aren’t trivial people, and they’re not grandstanding because there’s no audience. It’s like they’re just saying what it is, and you can be cynical about that if you want, but you’re a fool if you are because that means you’re cynical about the most noble ambitions of people who are making a genuine sacrifice.

These are hard jobs, and so—and it’s so nice to hear from you that you’ve been in the trenches working on these practical projects, and the consequence for you is that you’ve become, like, more optimistic and pleased with the characters of the people you’re dealing with.

Yes, yes. Let me be clear, Jordan. There are cases where infrastructure delivery is rife with corruption, and there’s Odebrecht in Brazil; you may be familiar with that scandal in South America.

Big, it’s a Brazilian construction company that was bribing public officials to be the winning bidder, and prime ministers went to prison. You know, so it’s not some pure—it’s the real world of humanity, right?

It’s not a pure thing, but I think that’s the exception rather than the rule.

Well, psychopaths are 3% of the population, not 97%.

And they never get above 5% before they’re culled, essentially; one to five percent, and the basic—the stable point of psychopathy prevalence is 3%.

And so the idea that it’s just malevolent, power-seeking that drives hierarchical organizations, it’s just wrong in the face of it because otherwise, there’d be way more psychopaths, and they’d be way more successful.

So—yeah, these are exceptions, especially in highly functioning societies.

And the U.S., I mean, there isn’t a society that’s ever been more highly functioning than the U.S., all things considered.

Wow, so I’m glad to hear that.

Well, I don’t think that’s—I don’t think that’s an unreasonable proposition. I mean, it’s the economic driver in some sense of innovation throughout the free world.

I mean, there are other countries that are doing well, but, you know, America is really a kind of epicenter, and everyone knows it. And so it’s—and it’s huge.

I mean, 300 million people—that’s a lot of middle class people, man.

Well, there is no Silicon Valley of Germany, right? I mean, to some extent, right?

Right, well, in Silicon—yeah, Silicon Valley, countries do can do beautifully, for sure.

I mean, the thing that people tend to forget about America is it’s like all of Europe in one place.

I mean, like the disparate cultures, climates, you know, perspectives, values, communities that are held together, it’s pretty extraordinary.

I mean, that’s another—and the diversity of government and the distribution of powers.

It’s a complex place, and so the fact that it functions as well as it is, as it does all the time.

I mean, a good index of that—you don’t think your systems are functioning well?

Well, have you plugged something into your outlet in your house lately, and has it—how often does that not work?

And that’s a complicated system!

Almost always works!

I do want to tell you maybe Jordan will appreciate this—a European friend, she was from Austria, came to New York, right? You know, to visit, and it was her first time.

And, you know, she had—her reaction was America.

She said, "Americans aren’t anything."

And I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

She said, "Americans aren’t." And this was after her visit; she said, "Americans aren’t anything."

What she meant is, you know, it’s—they’re not in New York, right? They’re not just Latin, they’re not Asian, they’re not—it’s like this big mishmash, right?

It’s like a U.N. meeting.

So, you know, if you look at New York City—of course, it’s different across the country—but a lot of places, there’s no unique, you know—it's a bunch of cultures thrown in together.

We lived—my wife and I lived at 55th and 9th Avenue in Hell's Kitchen for five years. I think there were 15 different ethnic restaurants within a short walk of our unit, right? So it’s this big mess.

What upsets me probably more than anything with the way that the cultural conversation has gotten so tribalized is that it removes the conversations about diversity from being joyful.

And there are so many ways that it’s such a driver of joy when you have friends and community and family and food and culture and music from across all of these different categories.

And, yeah, I’m finding people are increasingly constrained about how they even know how to talk about that is the one thing you know.

And then the other thing is, of course, not to detour us off into cultural territory because I know Jordan gets really uncomfortable discussing those things publicly.

But, you know, people also start to start to view it that there’s like one set of spokespeople from every community.

Like, I know people who only know woke Latinos.

Like, how limited is your world if the only people you know are one particular cross-section of a community?

Yeah.

And so they’re so diverse, Craig, the co-oh, yeah, they’re from Belize, they’re from Honduras, they’re from Mexico.

I mean, they’re all quite—they’re Panama, you know, Costa Rica.

I mean, I’m shocked at how—if you talk to those folks, how differently they view themselves, right?

That was one of the great joys of doing political outreach, you know. I did a lot of political outreach and conversations ramping up to 2020, but it’s like, you know, people talk about—you know, just use for an example the Hispanic vote.

It’s like, are we talking California versus Texas versus Cuban Americans versus Argentina?

Like, there’s such a range, and there’s so much—there’s so much, like what troubles me so much is the dampening down of the discussion in ways that are joyful because that’s always what wins hearts and minds.

It’s what wins— you know, the biggest thing that—well, I won’t get on a soapbox about it, so let’s go back to some concrete realities, so to speak, given we’re talking about infrastructure, right?

Rick, priorities—like that’s always difficult. What’s really broken that should be fixed, like first and for the biggest bang for the environment and for and for efficiency in your estimation?

Well, so, Jordan, there’s a couple of big projects that just must be done. The Gateway, you visit in New York, the Gateway Tunnel, about a $13 billion project. They’re the rail tunnels that run under the Hudson River, and they’re owned by Amtrak, but New Jersey Transit uses them during the peak commute.

There’s about one train per minute that goes through there. They are over 100 years old—probably 110. They are in dire need of being improved; there’s a new alignment just being almost replaced.

East Side Access, Jordan, in New York is the Long Island Railroad coming into the city. There’s a huge project that needs to streamline that.

There’s a rail tunnel in Baltimore City, where I’m from, that’s from the Civil War that’s too low for the trains to go through because it was designed during the Civil War, and that needs to be raised.

So I would say a few of these mega projects need to be done. The second thing, Jordan, is deferred maintenance.

We just need to upgrade—it could be airports, it could be dams, it could be levees, it could be seaports, it could be electrical systems.

I mean, just a crop—we need to prioritize where deferred maintenance has gotten to be, you know, a huge problem, and you know, and address that.

And the third one, Jordan, I’d say is we need to have some initiative—Greg could help with this—some initiative to have—not a developing technology, but an adoption of technology.

Just like a wave of technological adoption in infrastructure. And you know, there’s all this stuff where people, you know, are—they’re aware of this new technology and the latest app and all that sort of stuff.

But all of this—a lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about with smart stoplights, smart streetlights, I could do go on about liners for water pipes that will renovate water pipes that can—all the tend cost.

There needs to be some broad initiative—maybe we could do it when the president signs the bill—to say let’s just have a big initiative focused on this.

This is the ultimate bipartisan thing because it will reduce greenhouse gas, it will reduce, you know, soil emissions are horrible, gas emissions are bad, it will improve the efficiency of our infrastructure, and it’s there on the table.

It’s just somehow we can back—maybe backstop the risk of the asset owners, whether it’s a county or a city or a state or whoever it is, the city—backstop their risk somehow.

I don’t know. Let's just have some initiative to help these folks get the technology adopted, and Jordan, I would say that’s number one.

All right, great.

I think that’s a good place to stop.

I hope that we can have a conversation like this again and also to talk more—maybe we can organize this in some manner about how to ally the proper direction of the infrastructure project with the messaging.

We’ve outlined some of that today, which I thought was extremely useful, and so thank you very much, both of you, for participating today.

And definitely, let’s talk again, maybe in a month, month and a half or something like that.

Great, great. This was a pleasure.

Thank you, Rick. Good to meet you.

Greg, good to meet you.

Thanks, Greg. I’m happy to talk at any time.

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