Shovel-Ready - Stimulas Edition

The states will have to receive half of the $120 bil meant for repairing roads, bridges and such within 120 days. In this article posted in Popular Mechanics (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4302578.html), only projects which are able to start construction within 90 days of selection are eligible for funding. This means long term projects that will bring much more benefit to both the economy and the environment of the state such as trains and subways are out of considerations. Robert Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley described it best by saying, “If you want to patch some potholes in the road, this is a good program. But if you’re hoping for anything long-term with this approach, throw away all hope. It can’t happen.” This means that projects that are mostly left that qualified for the funding are the unappealing ones such as those which had been shelved after being fully designed and engineered but become outmoded or irrelevant, or projects with limited scope and ambition.

Let us now examined how infrastructure projects are planned and approved in California. A proposal of the project along with its budget had to be sent to the Department of Finance, the Department of General Services and the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Then there will be hearings before being included into the governor’s budget and then the state legislature will hold budget hearings, and both houses sent the approved bill to the Governor to sign. The project will also have to first meet the approval of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Normally during the design process, there will be lots of redo and rewrites by the civil engineer to ensure that all the requirements are met and those will take many months and possibly years. Of course there are several state agencies that have leeway to lengthy process such as the UCs and CSUs, prison facilities, and the Department of Water Resources.

Rebuilding infrastructure itself is a very important task as the outcome of the projects can dictate the fate of the cities involve as you don’t get to rebuild once things are completed. Long term planning and careful studies have to be done. As for stimulus itself, certainly hiring more engineers and professionals to do the job while encouraging the future generation to get more involve in this field of work is more rewarding than pothole filling and rushed projects. For the past 8 years, the world had been upgrading their infrastructure with their profits. We were left behind. With the current economy crashing down, it presents to use the opportunity to plan and to develop 21^st century infrastructure.