The plan finally approved on Friday will address transportation, water, broadband, energy and public safety needs that have been building for years, sometimes decades.
On the highway over the Teton Pass in Wyoming, avalanches have been threatening motorists since the 1960s. In Washington and Oregon, drivers live with the daily awareness that, in a major earthquake, the bridge between Vancouver and Portland will probably collapse. In California, residents are increasingly at the mercy of out-of-control wildfires and megadroughts — and their stratospheric costs.
America’s to-do list has been growing for years, since well before President Biden and a bipartisan committee in Congress agreed this year to a historic upgrade of the nation’s aging infrastructure. On Friday, the measure — held up for months amid negotiations over some $2 trillion in other spending — finally passed.
“This is a game changer,” said Mark Poloncarz, the county executive in New York’s Erie County. “Right off the bat, I have somewhere around $150 million in capital projects we could move, from bringing our wastewater treatment system into the 20th century to smaller bridges, some of which are 100 years old.”
The New York Times
By Shawn Hubler, Emily Cochrane and Zach Montague
Nov. 6, 2021