Washington - With Infrastructure Week 2018 under way, Business Roundtable today released a new video featuring Mike Burke, Chairman and CEO of AECOM and Chair of the Business Roundtable Infrastructure Committee, speaking about key priorities to rebuild America’s infrastructure and increase U.S. economic growth.
Infrastructure AECOM CEO Mike Burke in New Business Roundtable Video: ‘Infrastructure is an America Issue’
AECOM CEO Mike Burke in New Business Roundtable Video: ‘Infrastructure is an America Issue’
The full transcript of Burke’s video is provided below.
Transcript:
Infrastructure is important to America’s economy because, for decades now, we have underinvested in the necessary infrastructure to eliminate the friction on today's economy.
Everybody wants new and better infrastructure, whether it be Democrat or Republican. And taxpayers around the country are voting resoundingly for increased investment in infrastructure. So, it is a non-partisan issue and we just need to find a better way forward.
The advice that we have for policymakers is to focus on four priorities. The first priority being shoring up the trust funds.
The Highway Trust Fund needs a long-term, enduring solution – that is prepared today to go bankrupt in the year 2020.
Secondly, we need to focus on encouraging the private sector investment in public infrastructure. There are large pools of private sector capital that are waiting to be deployed on long-dated infrastructure assets, and we just need a federal policy to encourage that investment.
Third, we need to streamline the regulatory process. Today in America it takes over 10 years to implement an infrastructure project. We need to get that down to two years like we've seen in other developed countries like Canada and Germany.
And then fourth, we need to have a federal policy that incents state and local municipal investment in infrastructure in order to attach federal dollars.
Infrastructure policy is not a partisan issue. It's an America issue. We cannot have an ‘America First’ strategy if our infrastructure is last. We need to come together to solve this intractable problem that has gone on for decades now.