Optimizing Infrastructure Stewardship (2 of 2)

Happy Friday!

Infrastructure is more than a collection of roads, bridges, and water systems. It’s the foundational scaffolding of civilization itself, enabling commerce, mobility, health, and ultimately human progress.

Over the last 50 years, the world's infrastructure expertise has concentrated in consulting engineering organizations, making these the greatest repositories of multidisciplinary infrastructure knowledge and resources anywhere on Earth, honed through the discipline of market competition. No government, country, university, or institution of any kind can compare.

From first principles, the stewardship of a society's most critical assets must be entrusted to those possessing the greatest expertise. This alignment maximizes utility and fulfills the ethical imperative to deploy human knowledge for the collective good. Failing to do so invites social and economic decline.

Public agencies, constrained by structure, incentives, and governance, have become the weakest link, as noted last week. Their influence over infrastructure now outweighs their capacity to perform. With AI and accelerating innovation poised to widen the gap further, a new approach is both ethical and inevitable.

Public-Private Stewardship (PPS)

Time to engage consulting firms in multi-year PPS agreements to direct the stewardship of society’s investment in infrastructure. Consulting organizations can deliver the expertise, efficiency, innovation, resources, and accountability that public monopolies can’t.

Oversight can remain with the agency, but every position reporting to the elected body presents an opportunity to cut costs and enhance value in partnership with consultants. Yes, cut costs. The assumption that a consultant costs the public more than their public sector counterpart is easily refuted, and I’ll address it in an upcoming GNF.

Additionally, such partnerships could unlock economies of scale that individual agencies (apparently) can’t or won't realize on their own. The vast majority of municipal agencies employ a small staff serving fewer than 50,000 people. They operate as impoverished individual entities, each duplicating costly resources and competing with neighboring agencies to bid up salaries for critical staff.  

By contrast, one consulting Chief Plant Operator, for example, can easily oversee 2-3 small WWTPs simultaneously, halving or more the cost to each agency. Similar savings are possible for consulting City Engineers, Utility Directors, Planning Directors, mechanics, electricians, AI tool developers, and even City or District Managers. Plus, every consultant has ready access to the full expertise, insights, and resources of the private organization, even while costing each agency less.  

Public agencies and consulting engineers are, in fact, in the same business, working to protect the health, safety, and well-being of the public. Roles and responsibilities may evolve, but the objective remains unchanged.

Punchline: Given the fundamental importance of infrastructure to society, the magnitude of the public’s investment, the declining state of infrastructure stewardship, the widening capabilities gap between public monopolies and the great repositories of infrastructure expertise, and the common ethical imperative to maximize service to the public, it’s (past) time to modify our paradigm. It's time for public monopolies to relinquish or at least share their directive role, and let society’s world-class experts take the lead. Time to make infrastructure stewardship the catalyst for societal advancement that it should be, rather than an increasingly costly and burdensome drag on economic growth and our society’s future.

Hope you have a terrific weekend,

Dave

Looking ahead, focus on the macroeconomy and AI (from primary sources only); everything else is noise.

Feedback and blowback are always welcome: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

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