USC's Keston Infrastructure Institute Director Richard Little Outlines an Ambitious Agenda

MIR has covered the work of the Keston Institute since its founding. As the incoming director, what do you see as your role and the Institute's mission?

I perceive my role to be to try to inform the debate that is going on in California and also more broadly across the nation. Infrastructure is not just a California issue, but initially of course we will have a California focus. Our mission is to provide objective, factual information and policy assessments on infrastructure issues and to make these available as broadly as possible – to the administration and the Legislature in Sacramento, to local governments and area government organizations, and to the general public. We want our website to be a robust portal for information dissemination on these issues.

Last April, the Institute sent a report to Secretary of Business, Transportation, and Housing Sunne Wright McPeak with a list of recommendations for transportation funding and delivery reform [see MIR's April 2004 issue]. What is currently on the institute's plate for research and activity?

We have a couple of initiatives underway right now. One, we have been asked by Secretary Mike Chrisman to assist the Resources Agency with an advisory group that is looking into how CEQA – the California Environmental Quality Act – might be improved. Obviously, this is a major issue in the state – there are a lot of positions out there. We are going to try to inform that debate as it impacts infrastructure. We want to bring to this some facts and perspective and to see where CEQA impacts the provision of infrastructure and the degree to which CEQA impacts the delivery of projects – has infrastructure been held up by CEQA-related litigation or CEQA review?

Another activity that will get underway in February is a lecture series, for which we will bring in experts on various topics, probably once every other month initially. Our first lecture will address financing issues because I don't think the financing topic has been exhausted as of yet. We certainly need to explore it quite a bit more, because providing financial resources to infrastructure is one of the critical elements to solving our problems. If we don't understand what all the financing options are, as well as their limitations, we won't be able to do that. Further on down the road, I'd like to also have a lecture dealing with critical infrastructure protection, which is a major issue that will be looming over us for many years. We have to figure out how that fits in with broader homeland security issues, and ultimately how it will affect the provision of services. For example, how will increased security concerns at the ports affect the timely delivery of goods?

We have also discussed the development of appropriate and holistic management strategies for infrastructure. There are some tools that have come out of work on homeland security about how to develop robust strategies when you don't have all the information that you need, and I think there's some crossover opportunity there. Finally, we will convene some workshops, including one on CEQA and infrastructure that will provide input into the Resources Agency's advisory group and one on improved measures of infrastructure performance. That is probably our schedule for the next several months.

I am in the process of re-examining the Institute's strategic plan and work plan, so that we can develop a suite of activities and products that meet the needs of the people we see as our stakeholders, who, as I mentioned earlier, include the administration and Legislature in Sacramento, local governments, and area government organizations, as well as concerned individuals.

Richard, you come from the East Coast and have an extensive background in these issues there. Is there something different about how California engages the question of providing adequate infrastructure for our communities?

One of the things that I have been taken with out here is the level of involvement of the various stakeholders in infrastructure issues, which I think is very good. The other side of that is the question of whether or not the conversations and debates are being informed by the best possible factual and objective information. I haven't been here long enough to answer that question, but I think that the level of involvement by the citizenry is certainly higher than I've seen in some other places. It is a very interactive process here and the citizens are very much involved. I think to some degree that has to do with the system of referendum permitted by the California constitutional structure. This is certainly a more interactive system than in many states.

Another difference is the number of financing options that seem to have been precluded by political concerns. The state's constitutional framework and various ballot initiatives have also helped to structure how financing is treated. I keep getting back to financing because from my perspective it is critical to sustaining these public and private systems. You need to talk about the idea of sustainable infrastructure to understand these systems.

What do you mean by sustainable infrastructure? How is the Keston Institute involved in that area?

This is a construct that has been coming together for a couple of years. Everyone says that infrastructure is important. But when we look at our priorities – which are shown by how we spend our money – infrastructure funding keeps getting short shrift, so obviously we must put a lower priority on it than we say we do. If you think about transportation, power, water, waste disposal, and communications, all of those systems really act together interdependently. If service in one system degrades, you will possibly see degradation in other systems. It is much like how a natural ecosystem performs – if you stress one part of a natural ecosystem, you get impacts in others. We have not really thought about our physical systems that way, and we certainly haven't fully thought about the need to sustain them through their life-cycles.

Now, obviously you sustain physical systems differently than you sustain natural systems, but if you think of natural systems as needing food, air, and water to survive, you can think of physical systems as needing financial, human, and physical resources to survive. So, when we starve our physical systems of financial resources, when we decrease the amount of human resources available to manage and operate them, and when we don't maintain our systems, they are much like natural systems. They go through a sequence of growth, maturation, degradation, and ultimately death. If we don't intervene in that progression, that is exactly what will happen to these systems.

One of the things that I want to do here at the Keston Institute is to try to advance that concept and get some dialogue going. The university certainly has wonderful resources available in its faculty, and there are other schools in the California network. I really want to engage academics and practitioners, as well as the policy side, in thinking about this paradigm. I think if we can all understand how valuable these systems are to how we live, how we want to live, and how we want our children to be able to live, we need to find a new model to sustain these systems.

In this issue of MIR, we are publishing an excerpt of a recent report from the Reason Foundation called "Building for the Future: Easing California's Transportation Crisis with Tools and Public-Private Partnerships." The report focuses on how we might pay for new roads, highways, and dedicated spaces for cargo and goods movement. How do reports like this interface with the work of the Keston Institute?

The Institute places a strong emphasis on dissemination of ideas. We review reports like that one and convene focus groups to try to distill the best thinking. There are a lot of really good minds trying to get a handle on this issue. The more information, input, and people we can bring into this tent, the easier it will be to come up with solutions that will work economically, politically, and physically. That is really the key. We can't implement good policy if it is won't work economically or it won't work physically. They have to be holistic solutions.

The Reason Foundation report sounds like it talks about the need for public-private involvement. That is something critical to making progress because so much of the infrastructure industry is in fact private; it is not under government control, at least not direct government control. So, we are going to have to figure out ways to bring the best of the free market into the provision of goods and services, realizing at the same time that the free market alone cannot be trusted to deliver all of the services that we need, because there would be some very serious equity issues. Certainly the public and private sectors need to come together to discuss this and find solutions that work for both.

Finally, what would you say to state legislators about the infrastructure and transportation problems that California faces?

I would say that we should look beyond a single transportation solution. If you are trying to solve transportation, you need to look at infrastructure, but you also need to look at demand management because at this point we can't necessarily build our way out of problems. Obviously, there is more and better physical infrastructure needed, but we also need to manage the demand for that infrastructure, which means thinking in terms of land use, where people live and work, how we connect them up, and if we have the other resources and services available to sustain what improved transportation would bring. So, transportation is part of a bigger system, and we need to be careful not to just think about transportation but also how we are impacting other infrastructures, other land uses, and employment opportunities. Think in terms of systems, and keep the picture of the larger system in mind.