The infrastructurists

   With the U.S. Capitol building perfectly framed in the windows of a Library of Congress conference room, nearly 100 elected officials, nonprofit leaders, and others gathered in Washington today for the America 2050 National Leadership meeting on infrastructure, hoping to further forge a national plan for high-speed rail, water resource management, large-scale landscape conservation, and economically underperforming regions. "We're looking for a national framework and a system of incentives, a kind of perpetual motion machine" that would organize funding for inter-city rail, for example, similar to the interstate highway network, said Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, co-sponsor along with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. China and India are investing much more in infrastructure, knowing there will be a payoff in GDP growth down the road, he said.
   Noting a White House memo encouraging federal agencies to align their initiatives in a "place-based" framework, Lincoln Institute senior fellow and America 2050 co-chair Armando Carbonell said the key to infrastructure was planning at the right scale -- from the home and the neighborhood to the city and metropolitan regions and finally megaregions, such as the Boston-Washington corridor or the Pacific Northwest. Since the initial gathering in Washington in the spring of 2008, America 2050 has been holding forums in megaregions across the country, from California to Chicago to Texas, trying to determine how coalitions can be formed across traditional boundaries to lobby for investments -- acting as a larger region or collection of major cities. Policy and politics in federal spending has historically been driven by either individual localities or states.
   Karen Rae, deputy administrator at the Federal Railroad Administration, said there was interest in hearing "one voice" from a large region hoping to be part of the Obama administration's $6 billion High-Speed Inter-City Passenger Rail initiative. America 2050 recently published a report looking at 27,000 matched pairs of cities up to 500 miles apart to see where a new high-speed rail network would best begin, and advised starting with the Northeast corridor, California (Los Angeles to San Francisco), and the Great Lakes (Chicago to various cities such as St. Louis or Minneapolis). Former Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt, who joined the Lincoln Institute board earlier this year, led a panel on the conservation of large-scale landscapes, ecosystems, and wildlife habitat as another kind of infrastructure investment, while other experts underscored the importance of water resource supply and management as another critical component of green infrastructure. A final panel examined the needs of areas such as the Mississippi Delta, largely outside of megaregions, that have been hardest hit by the economic downturn. US Representatives Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon, and Tom Perriello, Democrat of Virginia, provided a glimpse of the likely Congressional agenda -- health care resolved by the holidays, followed by tackling climate change legislation, a possible second round of stimulus or economic development legislation, and other bills under consideration such as the Livable Communities Act and a new Superfund bill. The big opportunity for major change -- the reauthorization of federal transportation spending -- keeps getting postponed, possibly until after the 2010 elections, Blumenauer said. The economy and financing are serious challenges, and "we've got a long way to go in public outreach and building a constituency' in a volatile environment, he said. "We need to think of what will create the new competitive advantage," said Perriello. The national infrastructure agenda could be part of a half-dozen bills over the next year, said Yaro, despite growing concerns about the burgeoning federal deficit. "This is about the future of our country," said Yaro. "We shouldn't be apologetic about it."