Potholes, Roads and the Future of a Michigan Rustbelt Town

We discuss how the roads got so bad and how to fix the problem with road and infrastructure expert Dr. John Daly. 

Michigan has a significant problem with its roads and bridges. The state has one of the highest numbers of structurally deficient bridges in the country, and many of its roads need repair. This problem has been exacerbated by years of neglect and insufficient funding.

One of the main issues is the lack of funding to maintain and repair the roads and bridges properly. Michigan has relied heavily on gas tax revenues to fund infrastructure projects. Still, these revenues have been declining due to more fuel-efficient vehicles and the increased use of electric vehicles. Additionally, the state has not increased its gas tax since 1997, leading to a significant shortfall in funding.

The state has also struggled with inadequate funding for road maintenance, leading to a backlog of repairs that grows yearly. This has resulted in a significant portion of the state's roads being in poor condition, causing damage to vehicles and creating a safety hazard for drivers.

Furthermore, Michigan's harsh winter weather can also contribute to the deterioration of its roads and bridges. The constant freeze-thaw cycles and heavy snowfall can cause significant damage, compounded by the lack of proper maintenance.

To fix these problems, Michigan needs to invest in its infrastructure by increasing road and bridge maintenance and repair funding. This could involve increasing the gas tax or finding alternative funding sources, such as tolls or user fees. The state also needs to prioritize infrastructure projects and allocate funding more efficiently, focusing on the most pressing needs first.

In conclusion, Michigan's problems with its roads and bridges are multifaceted and require a comprehensive approach to fix. The state must address these issues in a timely manner to improve the safety and quality of life for its citizens.

Fixing aging roads and bridges in cities like Flint, Michigan, needs creative solutions for its hollowed-out city with blocks and blocks of vacant homes. While a vacant house can be torn down, the near-bankrupt municipality must maintain the aging paved roads in front of those houses. Is the answer to downsizing or shrinking the city? How difficult is that to do?   Get some answers to these questions and oth

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Transcript

Arthur Busch 0:05

Hello, this is Arthur Busch. You're listening to Radio Free Flint. Thank you for joining us today. How do we fix the roads in an aging rust belt city? That's the subject of our podcast: potholes, roads, economic development, and the future of Flint. Our podcast guest today is John Daly. John is a wealth of experience as a former director of the Genesee County Road Commission, as well as the former director of transportation for the city of Flint. John now works as the manager director of the Lapeer County Road Commission. How do we get ready for a winter? How do we fix the dam roads and get rid of those big potholes that ruin our cars, that make our travel difficult, and also make it difficult for Flint and Genesee County to attract jobs. So where do we go from here? That's the subject of this podcast. I hope you enjoy it. And today's guest is John Daley. So it's a pleasure to have you.

Speaker 1:10

Thanks, Art.

Arthur Busch 1:10

Yeah, you and I have worked together over the years uh in the county. I'm a big fan of yours. You've lived in Flint 20 some odd years.

Speaker 1:19

Well, I've lived in Genesee County for 20 years. I've lived in Flint for about 10, but I've worked in Flint for all the time.

Arthur Busch 1:25

You've been able to sort of assess the culture of the city. Uh I guess look overall looking at it, if if I was to ask you and I met you at the airport in Tampa, and I said, What's this place, Flint, Michigan, all about? How do you describe that? I mean, what is this town? Do you have a short answer for that?

Speaker 1:44

I'd say my my elevator speech for what Flint is, is that it's a neglected combination that can that can lead to very profitable outcomes, given the right leadership. And the leadership issue is key.

Arthur Busch 1:59

Is there any one word that you could describe Flint as? And I'm talking about the Flint area too, Wimbled, but what how would you describe the Flint area?

Speaker 2:07

More promising.

Arthur Busch 2:08

As you look at Flint and its culture, some people describe it, describe themselves with strong identity to the place. I mean, it's it's remarkable.

Speaker 2:19

My wife is a Viking. She's a Viking.

Arthur Busch 2:22

Well, my question to you is, are you a Flintstone?

Speaker 2:25

I'm a Flintstone by marriage and by choice.

Arthur Busch 2:28

And if you're a Flintstone, what does that mean?

Speaker 2:32

It means, first of all, that I put am especially concerned about the needs of the community, the residents thereof. And then the second thing is that I recognize that there's kind of a gestalt in, if you would, in the community that makes it different. This community is different. That doesn't mean it's easy. It just means it's different. In some aspects, it's significantly harder. It's resilient. I mean, most communities today, if they have been through what we've been through, I think would have collapsed. There is an inner resilience in the residents of Flint that they want to see this community move forward. And that's going to require leadership. It won't be easy. The path needs to be realistic, and it's one that needs to be shared.

Arthur Busch 3:17

You think that the history of Flint has much to do with that resilience?

Speaker 3:22

It does. It's, you know, it comes, it starts. There was a Flint before it was the birthplace of General Motors. And there'll be a Flint. General Motors will always have a present in Flint. I mean, clearly its impact will change just as the automobile industry's changed. If we learn one lesson that has come out of the situation we've been in, I think is don't be too dependent on any one thing.

Arthur Busch 3:46

Tell our audience about your background.

Speaker 3:49

I've came to Genesee County in '99. This is the longest I've ever been any place in my life. And I went to high school in Corpus Christi, Texas, graduated from there, and then went to uh college for my undergraduate work at Texas AM University at College Station. I went into the Marine Corps after graduation, became a pilot. I spent 22 years in the Marine Corps. Uh, did two tours in uh Vietnam, retired from the Marine Corps as a lieutenant colonel. In 1996, went to the uh city of Three Rivers in Michigan, just south of Kalamazoo, as their city manager, and I was there for a little over three years. In December of 99, I came to the Road Commission as the manager director, where I stayed until oh April of 18.

Arthur Busch 4:39

Did you ever have any road experience before you went to the Road Commission other than as a city manager?

Speaker 4:45

Not exactly as roads, runways, yes. One of my jobs, I've been a commanding officer of a squadron that was in charge of airfield maintenance. So we maintained the airfield side, and so we were responsible for maintaining roads and taxiways.

Arthur Busch 5:01

But you had tons of management experience for sure.

Speaker 5:04

Well, that was the thing they were looking for. In fact, I can remember uh when I was interviewing at the road commission, in fact, I told them flat eye, I said, you know, I'm not a manager, or I'm not an engineer, I'm a manager. And the response I got from John Austin at the time was, Well, we're looking for a manager. We have several engineers around here, but we need to have a good manager to put things together. I was happiest about during my tenure there for 19 years, and that's kind of unusual for a manager in the public sector to be there, or almost 19 years. You know, I got to see not only my ideas that I had get implemented or started, but implemented. And it was kind of interesting I found out that not all my ideas were that great. Luckily, things kind of self-correct. Why were you even interested in Flint? I really didn't know that much about Flint. At the time, frankly, I was more interested in the in the position at the Road Commission as a road commission. As you know, uh road commissions are unique to Michigan. Before they were established in 1927, and before that county system, the roads all belonged to the county or to the township. And so one of the things that I found interesting was that this passed not only by uh legislation uh by the state government out of Lansing, but also by public vote in Genesee County. I've been in governance long enough to know that when you have something new is established and they take something from somebody and give it to someone else, both by legislation and by popular vote. That's a really interesting situation to look into. It was like most positions, they don't tell you the bad stuff that happened before you got here until after you're there.

Arthur Busch 6:47

And so you landed in Flint. I'm not going to tell the people that if they're if their ropes were full of potholes and your car fell into uh that this is a guy that really you got you to yell at and asked that happens anyway.

Speaker 7:00

I mean, one of the things I did like your point about, you know, that most of my predecessors had been either active politicians or people that were retired looking for transition and to, I believe, to enhance their retirement. One of the things I came in the door with was that if I was going to be successful in Genesee County, that the Road Commission had to be a political. That took two years, uh, pretty much to do, and it was not without some pretty strong disagreements. And at that time I had a three-person board that I worked for. And of course, they're they were appointed by the county board, so they're coming at it from a political perspective. And I'm looking at it from a trying to manage the resources, which the roads in Michigan are underfunded now. They have been for the last 30 years and we're paying the price. But that was one of the things that I was happiest about was in the road commission when I was there, the politics stopped at my desk. Yeah, that we didn't fix things because of who was there or who wanted them fixed. We fixed them because it was the right fix at the right time and it would get the job done. I've always tried to remember that the money that we're using isn't my money, it's money that has really been loaned to me by the taxpayers.

Arthur Busch 8:17

John, you were responsible for uh the roads, which means potholes and so on, maintenance of the roads, but you were also responsible for the overall management.

Speaker 8:29

Yes.

Arthur Busch 8:29

I have a memory of some township that decided they didn't like it, fix the roads correctly, you know, maintain them correctly, said they didn't want to pay and so decided you can just take your road back. They tore the road up, and that was the end of that. Do you recall any of that?

Speaker 8:46

I recall that. That really happened just before I got to the road commission. One of the great myths in uh local politics with roads is that if you take that hard surface road and convert it back to a gravel road, that somehow over time it's going to save you money. The reality is that sounds good, but it's not correct.

Arthur Busch 9:07

Why isn't it correct?

Speaker 9:09

You have to look at the reason the road was paved in the first place, and that's because it had enough of a volume of traffic on the road that a gravel road can't sustain it. The second thing is that the conversion of the road or from a hard surface road to a gravel road is not inexpensive. You're looking at probably a price, I'd guess today, of somewhere around for a mile of that would probably be close to $200,000 to make that conversion. And then the second thing is, and this is kind of the joker in the deck, is that a hard surface road does not require the level of maintenance, especially in the first uh 10 years, that a gravel road does. A gravel road is maintenance intensive. You have to be out there restoring the gravel, regrading every 10 uh every at least two, possibly three times a year, depending on the location in the county. And about the only thing it does, really, is it does reduce the level of risk in the organization.

Arthur Busch 10:08

The lawsuit.

Speaker 10:09

Yep.

Arthur Busch 10:09

Is it likely the city of Flint could decommission roads because it has an abundance of infrastructure that's underutilized?

Speaker 10:18

I think the way we're looking at this is you have to look at two things. If you look at a blood vessel, you look at you can look at the length of the blood vessel, and you can look at the dimensions of the uh blood vessel itself, and we're doing a lot of that already, where we have reduced volume of traffic on some roads, and we're taking, say, for instance, a four-lane road and reducing it to two to three lanes, two travel lanes and a turn lane. So we're actually we are, in fact, reducing the size of the infrastructure that we maintain.

Arthur Busch 10:49

So Flint has 600 miles of roads, was designed for a much larger city today. That's true.

Speaker 10:58

That's a fair way to look at it. And that's not just the roads, that's also applies to other infrastructure like water distribution and wastewater collection. The difficulty in dealing with roads, as you know, is that once a property owner is granted the right to join to access a public road system from his property, we can't take that away from the property owner. We have to maintain that access.

Arthur Busch 11:23

Only way to do that is to compensate that person for his access.

Speaker 11:27

Exactly. And if you effectively, if if you eliminate the access of private provid property to the roadway, how do how does that property ever get used if it is going to be used? Use that land that I could see would be you'd have to merge it with another piece of property that had public access. The problem with it is you no longer have public access to the roads. So that means no mail delivery, no delivery of goods. You don't eat you're not even entitled to come onto the road from your property.

Arthur Busch 11:58

I talked to some experts who thought that the best way to approach this problem, and they feel that Flint may be off on the wrong track, that they're really doing it, you know, on a plical demand basis, or lack of a better term. And it's like how the road commission was run until you showed up, which was a guy like me calls and says, Hey, we got a pothole over here, guys. We need the ditch dug out, but he likes the he likes the flowers he planted out there. And there's this jostle goes on over the management of the road, and it's based on the the squeaky wheel gets the grease theory. Would you agree that happened at the road commission before you showed up? I mean, I'm sure it continues absolutely.

Speaker 12:39

One of the things that I've worked on for going on 20 years now to change that is I'm very a very staunch advocate of what they call infrastructure asset management, which is been is being implemented here in Michigan now as we speak.

Arthur Busch 12:56

How we fix Flint is what I'm really asking the question.

Speaker 12:59

What would the approach the very first thing you have to do? You have to remember, and you're sure, I'm sure, will appreciate this is that in order to do virtually anything in Michigan, while your cities are quote home rule cities, you have to have enabling legislation that allows you to do it from the state. The way in which road commissions and cities and villages can spend road money is very tightly controlled under Act 51, public Act 51 of 1951. For example, if I get X amount of money that comes from the state as a result of fuel taxes and registration fees. They tell me how much of that money I can spend on local roads, how much of that money I can spend on major streets, how much money I can spend for overhead, how much they could they really structure that budget. I would much rather have the latitude to say, okay, hold give me this amount of money, hold me accountable for the overall condition of the road system, and let me spend that money where I need to.

Arthur Busch 14:05

How would you assess the the overall flint areas?

Speaker 14:09

I would say the the infrastructure, okay, let's use like a rating system of A through F, A being excellent and F being failure. And failure means not that it's difficult to get through, failure means that it's impossible. So I would rate most of our infrastructure, you know, individually at the probably the C and D level. There's some of it that is up at the B level, especially if it's associated with interstate directly with interstate commerce. The interstates around I-75, 475, 69, US-23, they're all, I think, in pretty good condition. Are they perfect? No. Okay. If you look at the amount of money that flows into Michigan's coffers for roads, it's like seven and a half cents per gallon of gasoline. People have asked me, I've had a couple of people that have come back from tours in Germany and they say, why can't we have roads like they have like the Autobahn? Well, the answer is because the German fuel tax, when I last looked at it about two years ago, they were paying $1.2.15 in tax per liter, which is about $200 uh $2.30 a gallon, more or less.

Arthur Busch 15:24

So we pay and we pay seven cents and they pay.

Speaker 15:27

We pay seven cents. Our fuel taxes in Michigan are lower than they are for the uh states around us. And I'm not suggesting that's necessarily the only criteria you should use in raising the fuel tax, but that's certainly a point you should be looking at is okay, why are they willing to cash the political capital in order to bring that money into uh fix the roads? Again, you come back to the road problem has been postponed and delayed. It's now become it's become extremely expensive, and it's gonna be expensive not only from a financial perspective, but also from a political perspective. Because if you get it, once you start talking distribution of funds, now you're gonna have winners and losers. I'm a roads guy, okay? You want to know what it's gonna take to fix it, I can talk to you about that. You want to know how long it's gonna take, I can talk to you about that. We can talk about the type of traffic that's gonna be on there. But when you start talking about getting that type of funding, you've now reached a political issue. And that's in the hands of the politicians. And I uh while I'm not while I'm very sensitive to this, I would say that that's I can't really assess the political impact of the political cost that that's going to be. That's that's gonna be the big stumbling block. I mean, that's the reason this we're in this position. In the 10 years after World War II, there was a significant expansion of infrastructure, and now we're into a position where at a national level we've got more infrastructure that we can support, which brings us back to the key question of how do you do that? And most of the questions are not technical, they're not engineering. Uh, they're to some degree management, but the answers are largely political.

Arthur Busch 17:13

Well, they're also financial because you said it your choice is between fixing them up or or tearing them apart and abandoning them.

Speaker 17:22

That's the financial fix, but the the obstacle to implementing that is political.

Arthur Busch 17:27

Uh I mean Flint has a lot of assets. I mean, you're a road guy, but you're also a guy that knows the community. So you've been here on time. I mean, we have sale points. You know, people are always talking about our our negatives, some environmental issues. We've got a lot of unemployment, other things. But there are some who perceive Flint as a place that's dying and that it's gonna die.

Speaker 17:49

I don't see that. I see that there's with the right leadership, there is the opportunity for rebirth. Go back and you look at the reasons that brought people to Flint originally, and frankly, they were largely transportation. We're if you look at our our overall transportation systems that we have, we're a nexus of transportation. Rail, air, and uh surface are all all across in Flint. And the only thing we don't have is port. There's tremendous opportunities there to emphasize what I call transportation, but that transportation option or infrastructure.

Arthur Busch 18:28

So wherever this all goes, Flint still has, I mean, they do have some world-class infrastructure because they have they have supported world-class manufacturing these uh and that hasn't really dissipated. I mean, it hasn't gone away. It's it's right now it appears in a state of decay.

Speaker 19:41

It's in a state of decay, and but it it can it can be reused.

Arthur Busch 19:46

People from Flint, they're pretty optimistic people for the most part. You look at what's happened in the national media with the water crisis and a few other problems, not the least of which are crime and unemployment. In spite of all that, there's optimism for what the future of this of this region might be. Do you share that optimism?

Speaker 20:05

Yes, I do.

Arthur Busch 20:07

Why?

Speaker 20:08

As I indicated earlier, we are in a very strong position just simply because of our location. What's the key issue in real estate? Location, location, location. We score points on that right away. We're a nexus for a fairly significant educational capability. You have uh U of M Flint, you have Kettering, you have Mott Community College, and several other private uh colleges around the area, or trade school type technical schools around the area, all of which can provide skills and education to workers. And that's that's one of the things is the economy is moving into a uh almost a fifth generation with the incorporation and fusion of digital. Technology at a baseline level, and it's going to happen. We need to have a workforce that's prepared to do that and can consistently provide training to the existing workforce on new processes and new equipment coming in.

Arthur Busch 21:09

And you believe Flint has the ability to deliver on that?

Speaker 21:13

I believe that Flint has the ability to deliver on that. When you look at the capabilities, particularly of U of M Flint, Kettering, and Mott Community College, those abilities are there to do that. The linkage between what industry needs and what the academic world can produce probably should be better and needs to be worked on. But I believe that it's there to provide that quality training to a workforce that will be able to work on fifth-generation uh manufacturing items. One of the things in local roads, our majors in uh in majors are pretty good, in pretty good condition. I'm saying that guardedly, that's relative to the communities around us. American Society of Civil Engineers just came out with a report card, and nationwide they gave roads a D minus. But the local roads, the residential streets, are the ones that are really suffering. And the problem is under the constraints of Act 51, I can't get money through. The city of Flint is going to receive $99 million, more or less, over two years. There's a provision in there, none of that can be spent on roads. If you look at the American Jobs Act that just came out, $4 trillion over 15 years, about $657 billion, I believe, is going to be spent on infrastructure. That includes things like roads and bridges, certainly, but it also includes marine ports, airports, and electric vehicles, railroads, and everything. And if you look at the amount of money that's actually going into roads and bridges, again over 15 years, we're now down to $157 billion nationwide. None of that money is going to go to the quote local streets, the residential streets, because they're not eligible for federal aid.

Arthur Busch 23:02

So if we look at the city of Flint, what would it take to bring it to a desirable level?

Speaker 23:08

The asset management system has a rating system called the PACER system. Goes through one to five. The lower you are, the bet the worse you are. So if we're talking, what would it take to put the roads at twos and threes, between two and three? One's new construction. My hip pocket estimate, we've never done a formal estimate on it, but my hip pocket estimate is about probably close to 8.3 million over four years. What would it take to bring it to the best? One, the best is defined as new construction. So if you're going to bring it to the best under that scale, you've got to re reconstruct every road in the city. There's not enough money for that.

Arthur Busch 23:48

Well, if we did it to the just give me an idea what that would be.

Speaker 23:52

My own personal estimate is you're probably talking $25, $30 million.

Arthur Busch 23:56

And so you're saying your estimate is somewhere under $10 million would fix Flint's road.

Speaker 24:02

There's two hooks in that. The first is that after that construction period is over, you're going to have adequate ret revenues to maintain those roads in the condition they can through their service life, which for a road generally is between 20 and 25 years. Second thing is you spread that money over uh at least three to four years so that you can spend that money and get the best value out of it.

Arthur Busch 24:29

Is there an escrow fund for these things?

Speaker 24:31

You can't put it in escrow because the the legislators in Michigan, they knew they were underfunding the roads. That, for instance, is why there's a requirement for a local match at for local roads. Under Act 51, is they really expect you to spend all of your money each year on road and not carry over.

Arthur Busch 24:54

So if we look at Flint, $7 million just buys us a mid-range rating.

Speaker 24:59

Right.

Arthur Busch 25:00

Does that fixing them to the mid-range position have say anything about these roads, essential streets and abandoned by the public? I mean, the houses don't exist, so there's not obviously there can't be much traffic.

Speaker 25:12

But again, you're dealing with an asset's asset that's got a service life of over 20 years. So when you're making that decision, you've got to look not only at the day, but what's going to be the utilization of this property over the over that span.

Arthur Busch 25:27

How many miles of roads does the city of Flint need?

Speaker 25:30

That I don't know because you get into this trap of where I've got a house that's sitting in it at the end of the road. I have to put that road down and incur the cost of putting the road down for the house. I mean, you can look at several alternatives. When I was at the road commission, we had a bridge that was out by uh Bishop International Airport that had been down, was in need of reconstruct, had been on the list for like 15 years before I got there. We finally got it funded. And there was one house on the other side of the road of the bridge. That was the reason we were putting the bridge in, was ostensibly for that to support the house. We were seriously considering buying the house and the property and just demolishing the house and restoring the property and give it, resell it, or give it to the airport. The reason we didn't was because when they did the extension runway extension, the fire department needed to have that bridge in order to access that far that southern end of the runway. So we went ahead and redid the bridge because we had the funding, but we do think like that. That's always a consideration. But again, you're talking about the property use drives the roads, not the roads in the long term. Not the roads drive the property. In the short term, that may be true, that the roads drive the property. When you say we're going to deny access or we're going to restructure the road, you're making a decision that's going to affect the use and value of that property over the next 20 years.

Arthur Busch 27:01

Exactly. What I'm saying is that at some point that you're going to have whole tracts of land in Flint uninhabited, slow bleed or this slow process of devolution of those neighborhoods in Flint are expensive. They're dangerous. Absolutely. They're dangerous to public health. They're dangerous to the economic stability and solvency of the city of Flint, Michigan. When do we get around to start thinking about this? We think about it, but again, when do we get around to a plan to solve that problem?

Speaker 27:32

That's well, the first thing you've got to do before you have a plan, yes, have a goal. And then we've got to have before we craft the plan, we've got to have the tools. The major problem that I keep running into over 20 years, because I've spent some time thinking about this, is continually the restrictions that the state has put upon the use of funding. For instance, if in the scenario you're describing, it doesn't matter whether the house is unoccupied. The question is who owns the property. And as long as there's an owner to the property and access has been granted, you can't take that away from it without paying for it.

Arthur Busch 28:10

I mean, this problem is going to meet a resolution at some point. It's inevitable. Whether that resolution is in a bankruptcy court or whether that resolution is by the people and their representatives sitting down at a table figuring out what's the best public policy. It's not about politics, it's about finance.

Speaker 28:28

I agree with you, but I thought that first of all, the legislature, if they've ever applied creativity, it's in finding ways to kick the can down the road to keep from having to deal with this issue. And every time I think that, you know, for instance, when they had the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, I thought, oh, this is going to be it. This is going to be the hallmark event that's going to cause us to take a real look at how we fund roads, not just in Michigan, but across the United States, didn't work. The impact lasted for about three months. And then we went back to business as usual. And the problem the legislatures don't realize is that it's a very short-sighted approach in kicking the can down the road. Every time you do that, and I'm talking about delaying solving the problem, your options get fewer, and the ones that remain become more expensive.

Arthur Busch 29:18

I get it that the legislature has a bad system right now. It's basic hamstring of any creative activity. But you have the state of Michigan who really is exerting an undue amount of its sovereignty over the city. And Michigan has a whole collection of these cities from coast to coast, mostly in the urban areas where they've been hollowed out.

Speaker 29:40

We're going to have to do some really innovative things. The solution is we need to go back and look at our strategy. Most of the streets in Michigan in Flint, the street mileage is local road. And that's where most of the problem. But the locals, we're going to have to have support and help. I don't believe there's sufficient funds available, property tax and income tax in the city of Flint to fix those roads without supplemental funding, the local roads.

Arthur Busch 30:06

We had a governor that ran on roads. Isn't all that unusual? A politician talks about roads at the local, but at the state level, she made it her top priority. Obviously, it's knocked her off that game. But her strategy is to fix the damn roads.

Speaker 30:19

That was her slogan.

Arthur Busch 30:20

I'm not sure what that meant exactly. Uh, fix whose roads, how many roads, and uh move aside that, or and with what money. Has Michigan made any progress?

Speaker 30:31

The first thing is I've learned that when you're dealing with the state and roads and they talk about Michigan's roads, you have to be really careful and understand exactly what they're talking about. Are they talking about all of the public roads in Michigan, or are they talking about the state trunk line system? Because they'll use that term Michigan Roads to mean both things. So you have to be very clear what you're talking about. I'll go back to the asset management strategy. There is now a organization, the Michigan Infrastructure Council, that I've been on, uh I'm a charter member of. I mean, I'm serving my second term on there. That's task is to develop a statewide asset management strategy for not only roads and bridges, but for several different forms of infrastructure, including water, wastewater, electricity. The problem is a funding issue. It's not a strategy issue. The strategy issue is there. The goals are there.

Arthur Busch 31:26

What are the goals of that task force?

Speaker 31:28

That task force is to develop a 30-year asset management plan that will provide sustainable infrastructure for Michigan's residents in the areas of roads, bridges, water, wastewater, railroads, and electricity. And I think those are the ones we're chartered to do deal with. So the strategies are starting to develop or in place. Again, the problem is the funding mechanism.

Arthur Busch 31:52

Is there a different strategy for uh these communities that are distressed, like Flint, uh Highland Park, Daginaw?

Speaker 32:00

The state that provides the overall umbrella for the strategy, the development of a strategic plan within that becomes the responsibility of each community or each business.

Arthur Busch 32:12

Strategic plan is being developed locally?

Speaker 32:15

Yes, from the bottom up.

Arthur Busch 32:16

Is there any overall arching uh concept that we might see a plan develop?

Speaker 32:22

That's gonna come. The the difficulty, of course, is it all comes down to funding. You can have the best plan in the world, and if you don't have a supporting funding mechanism, you don't execute.

Arthur Busch 32:34

You pointed a finger really a lot at the not just the government itself as being an impediment toward building a future, Flint and other towns like it, but it seems like you've also pointed a finger at leadership in a very broad way, saying that until they see this is about public policy and not politics, not likely to make any progress. Right.

Speaker 32:57

One of the things that comes that comes out when you implement an asset management strategy, when you're looking at where you're going to place the money, where you get the most return on investment, is that your initial investment in whatever infrastructure system you're talking about is not in the worst first category. And that's a difficult position for the politicians, frankly, because you're asking them for money to fix roads that are in better condition than the ones that their constituents are complaining about. And the reason you have to do that, though, is so that you can start saving the money so you can use it, you can accrue money, as we talked about earlier, to go back in three or four years and start fixing those more doing those more expensive fixes.

Arthur Busch 33:43

Do we have any kind of a trust fund for roads like they do for air?

Speaker 33:47

No, it's funded by the amount of money that comes in every year uh from your tax at the state level from the taxes and the roads and bridges.

Arthur Busch 33:56

Would a trust fund help Michigan? Is that a potential well?

Speaker 34:00

The devil's always in the detail.

Arthur Busch 34:02

Now you're describing an environment in Michigan where local leadership becomes really paramount. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

Speaker 34:11

Absolutely. It becomes paramount and it also becomes paramount for the public to understand that the importance of fixing the system, especially the importance economically.

Arthur Busch 34:25

What are the chances that's going to happen?

Speaker 34:27

Here, if you're talking about the chances will it happen tomorrow morning, not very good. My hope is that the steps that we're taking uh right now in developing a statewide asset management base are going to be very helpful. It's very easy to promise something about roads. I heard this one saying that I thought was great, and that's the when I was a child, the fairy tales started with uh once upon a time, now they start with once I'm elected. And it's very easy to grab onto roads and be in a political platform. But what you find out is delivery of that promise when you take office is extremely difficult. There is a reason why this has this political issue been kicked down the road for the last 20 years. And the reason is because it's extremely difficult, and it will be extremely costly to address these things, not just from a financial point of view, but also from a political point of view. Uh there's a couple of things that I would really want to take a look at. One is I think you've got to look at it. This is a problem that's not just a roads and bridges problem. It's an infrastructure problem. It's the the symptoms that I've described to you affect not only uh roads and bridges, they affect uh water lines, distribution systems, wastewater collection, electrical utilities, railroads, airports. I mean, we're organized structurally very much the way we were in the 1890s with the boundaries of villages, the cities, uh what they can do, what they can't do. That really hasn't changed that much since that time, where the population density and what it's doing has changed.

Arthur Busch 36:11

John, John, thank you for joining me on this podcast.

Speaker 36:14

Thank you very much, Archie.

Arthur Busch 36:16

So if you like this podcast and others, please sign up for our mailing list. It's free. You can do so at radiofrequent.media. We can provide this podcast. It's written and performed by George Witcher.