Blueprint 2025 Leadership Forum Aims to Reframe Discussion of Infrastructure

Senior industry strategist, Civil Infrastructure of Autodesk, Terry Bennett, spoke to AECCafe Voice this past week about the Blueprint 2025 Leadership Forum held in Washington D. C., earlier this year.

According to the B2025ForumReport, the inaugural Blueprint 2025 Leadership Forum was held in Washington, D.C. on April 27, 2017 and included participation of nearly 300 infrastructure executives and various policymakers from State and City Authorities, the Administration and Congress. Those in attendance provided timely insights into the B2025 national infrastructure initiative and outlined the challenges and opportunities that surround the establishment of infrastructure as one of America’s top priorities. These leaders documented the proposition that there are many critical projects, already engineered and fully fundable from non-federal resources ready to be brought on-line to address long overdue needs, create major stimulus and job opportunities, and maintain the U.S.’ leadership position.

Those in attendance wanted to reframe the discussion so that it proceeded from the basic understanding of the term “Infrastructure.” The term “Infrastructure” refers to all of the basic physical systems that enable a country or community to operate. More than roads, streets, and bridges — it includes power generation, transmission, communications, interoperable computer systems, navigation systems, ports, pipelines, airports, healthcare, waterworks and waterways as well as security systems to protect all of the above — essentially all of the elements essential to our nation’s operation.

“We’re talking about the all physical system in the community,” said Bennett, “so rather than just talking about the gas tax or roads and bridges, reframe it in the minds of the public. Every time you go in a grocery store, the products you buy came over a transportation network; every time you turn on a faucet, that water came through a water supply system. Infrastructure is much bigger than just the roads and highways. We really need to share the understanding of what these systems do and tie it into what people understand. Infrastructure is not built for itself, it’s built for the people. It is tied very closely to economic growth and job creation. Including that into the framework, the 100 CEOs and public sector representatives that are part of this initiative put down in the documents what the main critical threads are that have to take place almost simultaneously to get this thing off the ground. What top 11 things that have to be done, things like having a vision, going back to what Eisenhower did for the interstate, understanding what are the challenges to financing how do you rethink capital budget.

“People are talking about how we need an influx of people,” said Bennett. “Public Private Partnerships (P3s) are great, but if a state agency or government does a P3 for a hospital or road, how does the federal government who has never done P3s, know what they need to do to change? What does the Office of Management and Budget need to consider?”

The whole idea is to collect information to become a resource, so if they have questions, they can ping people who have done this before so it’s not like starting from scratch. There are some strategic projects, regulatory transformations, and challenges such as, how do you speed up project approvals that tend to slow down and derail projects on cost and budget just because of the amount of time it takes?

“How do you track progress? How do you look at infrastructure review, so there’s a dashboard of what did we invest, what was the return, what was the result? What’s good what’s bad, how do we apply it differently for something similar so we have a way of tracking the stuff,” said Bennett.

In terms of leadership and business model innovation, where there is a big infrastructure push, there is a need to know where the talent is needed. The talent will be needed in engineering, planning and other professions. An infrastructure council comprised of a series of experts that the government can lean on day to day is needed.

The White House has had councils for the environment and other parts of infrastructure for decades, but they have not had a National Infrastructure Council, in spite of the fact that infrastructure has a huge impact on the GDP.

Autodesk and infrastructure leaders have been working with transition teams after they took office. As of a few weeks ago, 16 of the 19 recommendations are being explored by the White House teams.

Financing a budget, streamlining project approvals, leveraging technology like BIM and analytics, allowing project approvals to be fully reviewed, in a much more modern sense, without compromising safety and quality, with streamlining reviews, based on information that comes from places like Map21 that is using modeling and analysis for roads and highways, are all parts of a project that could be made available for any government infrastructure project, not just roads and highways.

“We’ve had actual discussions with the OMB to talk about when you start to consider finances and funding,” said Bennett. “The scoring of projects is a big deal because they tend to front load everything, and we know infrastructure is a seven year asset. How do you transition from all the costs in the first year to where the private sector monetizes it over 75 years as a private operator? How does the government transition from being that to this?”

According to the Brookings Institute in a 2014 report, there are 845,000 public assets, that are owned by government that could be identified for long term leases or full on privatization where that money could be recaptured and used to fund new structure that government does want to use. The U.S. government is probably the largest asset holder in the world of things.

Many assets such as buildings, highways, bridges, networks, etc. have been here for 50-75 years, and they need to look at whether they really need that particular asset any more, or if they could invest that money into useful infrastructure.

Those recommendations being explored include looking at how to score P3s differently in terms of asset recycling, picking projects that are shovel ready, not just in theory but in practice, and already have private investment behind them. They may be waiting for regulatory approval.

There should be a full business report on a particular infrastructure report. “It goes beyond just using BIM for a bunch of visualizations and simulations, but to tie that analysis to triple bottom line analysis,” said Bennett.  “We need to look at the social environment and environmental impacts of approach and then maximize for the highest lifecycle returns so that we know a building is not just the most practical, but has the highest lifecycle returns for lowest operating costs. Those are the types of things that allow them to see better spent money – comparing and contrasting dollar and where it goes to have the biggest return for community.”

Educating the public to the fact that food arrives at the grocery across transportation, and not all that investment will rely on city infrastructure.  There are the rural networks, because that’s where the power gets put through, where the water systems are, and where the transportation networks are. People may focus around a particular asset in a city without understanding that a lot of infrastructure is connective tissue between cities and states and includes rural areas.

Autodesk’s role in this initiative will be to continue to have technology conversations and work at identifying some of the pilot projects, then use them as examples of how to get things done with modern technology. Full utilization of BIM and visualization is paramount to delivering these projects. Some of the projects are private and have permits, and don’t require government funding, so they can move forward.

The goal with regulations is to remove those that are redundant that are required by multiple agencies. Many agencies have different ways of satisfying environmental impact, for example. The common belief of this gathering is that there should be one regulation set that everyone submits. Many times a building that has already been built is using the same design and specs and has already been through the permitting process. Perhaps that could be made simpler for the second rendition of that building design, with only the different aspects of the design plus improvements subject to new regulations. The idea would be to not start every IES permit from zero.

Environmental quality regulations can be visualized in a single context with fewer permits. This process can be helped along with BIM, visualization and leveraging today’s technology.

The following are the 19 recommendations made by the Blueprint participants included:

In the Long-term vision section:

1. Infrastructure Vision 2025.  Create a public, consensus-based Vision 2025 Statement clearly stating the investment goals and priorities of the next administration.

2. Create an Infrastructure Plan.  Based on key metrics – investments, jobs, economic value added – create a detailed plan for each year from 2017 through 2025

In the Financing & Funding Strategies section:

3. P3 Initiative.  Encourage rapid diffusion of public-private partnership (P3) delivery models and adoption of P3 best practices across U.S. infrastructure markets.

4. National Infrastructure Bank.  Explore mechanisms for ‘democratizing’ infrastructure investment, for example by making infrastructure bonds, akin to victory bonds, available to the general public.

5. Capital Budgeting.  Develop and implement a mechanism for infrastructure capital budgeting at the federal level.

In the Technological Revolution Section:

6. Office of Infrastructure Technology Innovation. Create an Office of Technology Innovation in Infrastructure, and build an ‘innovation attitude’ throughout the value chain.

7. Federal Public/Private Partnership. Create a federal budget for new infrastructure technologies – including new technology, and rapid approvals, focused on high-impact solutions

In the Strategic Projects section:

1. Strategic Projects.  Identify the projects, from around the country and by sector, that best advance the nation toward the Administration’s long-term vision for the economy in terms of immediate benefits (e.g., congestion relief); long-term prosperity generation (e.g., jobs & opportunities created); and innovative advances beyond current state, shifting the infrastructure development paradigm toward the faster, higher-quality, more efficient model needed for long-term success. (An initial list of 50 strategic projects, developed by CG/LA over the past six months in partnership with Blueprint 2025 participants, follows on pages 12 and 13.)

2. Citizen Engagement.  Use IT to continuously and deeply engage users and communities in assessing the expected long-term economic and social value of proposed infrastructure investments, and link that methodology to project prioritization.

3. Create & Deploy a Wider Economic Benefits Metric. To help move from an infrastructure project development process influenced at many stages by short-term political incentives to a more transparent one that protects the inherently political nature of public infrastructure project selection while professionalizing project appraisal, the administration should lead development of a standardized approach to evaluating wider economic benefits (WEBs) of projects. (WEBs refers to the indirect impacts of infrastructure investment on productivity and the reorganization of business activity at regional and national levels.

In the Regulatory Transformation section:

1. Two-Year Limit.  Establish clear start and finish dates for regulatory and permitting actions, with the explicit goal of reducing permitting duration to two years or less, and facilitate monitoring and transparency about these milestones by expanding use of the Federal Infrastructure Projects Permitting Dashboard and similar tools.

2. Empowered Lead Agency.  Strengthen institutional support for collaboration among stakeholder agencies in a project permitting process, including especially the selection of a lead agency and empowering it as a coordinator of all regulatory reviews for that project.

In the Global Economic Transformation section:

1. Quadrennial Infrastructure Review.  Define priority infrastructure sectors, subject to periodic review and revision in the Quadrennial Infrastructure Review, based on alignment with projected economic needs, long-term strategic value, technology and global opportunities. (This specifically prioritizes private sector investment, and projects driven by that investment.)

In the Public Sector Leadership section:

1. Infrastructure Team Profiles.  Define strategic objectives, and enable high-functioning interagency leadership teams in each priority infrastructure area (e.g., electric transmission, urban transit), and revitalize existing professional cadres, focusing on communication of strategic goals and obtaining ‘buy-in’ for dynamic innovation to achieve those goals.

2. National Infrastructure University.  Create a National Infrastructure University program, akin to the Naval War College, as a training ground for career public sector infrastructure professionals entering leadership ranks.

In the Institutional Redesign section:

1. National Infrastructure Council. Create this council to provide overall federal coordination and high-level, bipartisan advice on infrastructure issues to top Administration officials.  Appoint a highly-qualified infrastructure professional to chair the council, a body within the Executive Office of the President with Cabinet representation.

2. Shadow National Infrastructure Council.  Begin the process of establishing a complementary, independent “shadow” National Infrastructure Council to oversee consolidated infrastructure budget responsibility and implementation of Administration infrastructure strategy across the federal government.  This is perhaps like the shadow FOMC.

In the Business Model Innovation section:

1. Allow Productivity Capture.  Utilize available policy tools to create a “drive for productivity” in the industry, systematically encouraging innovation that leads to increases in productivity throughout the infrastructure industry.

In the Labor & Training for an Infrastructure Build section:

1. Annual Joint Industry/Labor Annual Productivity Report. Create a set of productivity metrics, focused on dramatically increasing the productivity of investment dollars spent on infrastructure projects – tapping into lean methodologies for transformative insights.

Of those submitted above, the following 16 have been implemented:

• Vision – two Term
• Create Infra Plan
• P3 Initiative
• Capital Budgeting
• Enforce two-year regulatory limit
• Lead agency mandate
• P/P Tech Partnership
• Office of Infra Innovation
• Build Global Scenarios
• Natl Infrastructure Agency
• Shadow National Infrastructure Council
• Infra Team Profiles
• Industry / Labor Productivity Report
• Build Profit Capture
• Strategic 100 Projects
• Create Wider Economic Benefits Metric

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