To Keep Infrastructure From Falling Apart, Dedicate the Funding

Bob Hellman's Governing opinion column begins with wildfire season and the lesson Los Angeles learned too late. When the Palisades fire broke out, firefighters opened hydrants and found water pressure so low that their hoses were useless, with as many as 20 percent of hydrants in the fire area affected. Hellman argues that the failure was not bad luck but the predictable result of decades of deferred maintenance in a water storage system that political incentives never rewarded anyone for fixing.

The pattern repeats in cities and counties of every size and political makeup. Maintenance is unglamorous work. Road repairs rarely earn ribbon cuttings, and a repaved stretch of highway looks much the same when the work is finished as it did when it began. Politicians seldom receive credit for championing upkeep, which means there is rarely any political cost to skipping it. Meanwhile extreme weather is wearing down old systems faster than they are being repaired, and the growing politicization of routine projects gives elected officials one more reason to push maintenance aside. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass turned to the city's first-ever Capital Infrastructure Program only after the fires and in the middle of a competitive runoff, an example of a response arriving after the damage is done.

Private capital operates under a different set of rules. A company that starved its factories of maintenance funding for decades would destroy the value of its own production line. When private investors finance a tolled bridge or a freeway bypass, they insist on funding plans that keep the asset working and protect its cash flow and value. Public infrastructure frequently runs on the opposite logic: cut upkeep now, hope the system holds, and send taxpayers the bill when it does not.

There are models of the right approach. The Golden Gate Bridge was built under budget and ahead of schedule, and it has been maintained meticulously for nearly 90 years. The reason lies in its financial structure. The bridge is run by an independent authority that the California Legislature created specifically so local politicians could not divert toll revenue to other priorities. Every toll dollar goes back into the bridge and its associated transit services. Crews paint the structure continuously, beginning again at one end the moment they finish the other. Because funding is tied to the asset's own revenue stream instead of competing each year with other line items in a general fund, the maintenance actually happens.

Florida applies the same structure to its toll roads, in part because state law requires it. Tolls collected on a revenue-producing project must first pay the annual cost of operating, maintaining, and improving that project, and any remaining funds must go toward roads in the same county or counties. The blueprint in both cases is identical: establish steady funding for the asset and protect that money from being spent elsewhere.

For mayors, city managers, and other local leaders, it is often easier to repair a failure after the fact, usually at far greater expense, than to defend maintenance budgets from cuts and delays year after year. Bridge collapses and dry reservoirs do not result from a single missed repair. They come from long stretches of decisions to spend maintenance money on something else. Governments that build capital discipline into the way they govern give themselves a far better chance of heading off problems before they become crises, and of protecting the public investments they have already made.

Bob Hellman is CEO of American Infrastructure Partners, which works with local governments to address critical infrastructure needs.