The Role of Sustainable Infrastructure in a Changing World – Ep 276

What if you could go to a conference where project managers from the architecture engineering and construction industry were sharing their best practices, their strategies, their tools and templates for how they tackled the biggest project management challenges. Well now you can. EMI is proud to have created the first event of this kind called AEC PM Connect. For all the information about this annual event that helps project managers connect with other PMs in the industry, please visit www.aecpmconnect.com. Did you know that over 40% of the bridges in the US are at least 50 years old? That's a staggering statistic when you think about the safety and efficiency of our infrastructure. Failures in infrastructure can lead to devastating impacts on communities, including long delays and economic losses. Today we have a special guest with us, Maria Leeman, Maria's a licensed professional engineer. She is the 2023 AEC National President and she also serves as the US Infrastructure Lead at GHD. And we're going to explore the critical components necessary for developing sustainable and durable infrastructure such as the pressing challenges posed by climate change and its impact on infrastructure. I'm your host Anthony Fosano and this is the Civil Engineering Podcast. All right, now I'd like to welcome our guest onto the podcast for today. Maria Leeman is a licensed professional engineer. She is the US Infrastructure Lead at GHD in the AEC National 2023 President and actually I should say Maria, welcome back to the Civil Engineering Podcast. Oh, thanks Anthony for having me again. Absolutely, it's good to have you back. We've had your AEC President since the last time we spoke and I know you've been very busy in addition to, oh, by the way, Infrastructure Lead at GHD. But we're going to get into a lot today. And maybe you can start by just, I know maybe not everyone saw you the last time on the show. Maybe give us a little bit about yourself and how really have you got to be the position of the Infrastructure Lead at GHD? Take us through your career journey. Yeah. Well, I graduated in 1981, doesn't seem like that's even possible. And throughout my career, I was always looking for challenging opportunities. And so started off at Bed de Lucada, which was part of Parsons and did some private sector work until 2000. And then I had friends tell me that we're on a transition team. We had a new county executive in Eury County, New York, that I ought to consider becoming a commissioner of public works. At the time, I was head of quality for URS. Corporately, I loved what I was doing. It was very interesting work. And I basically said, well, here's my resume. Have a good time. I like what I'm doing. If you really think, you know, so I posed the challenge and I had been in the private sector for almost 20 years. That was my first step in the public sector. I did that for about five and a half years. Back into the private sector knowing full well that I'd be back in the public sector. I really came to the conclusion with my first job in the public sector that five years is about the half life. You know, after five years, which is like a term and a little, you're either not doing your job or somebody's asking you to compromise your ethics. It's just the way it is if you're a licensed professional. They're things we just don't do. So I left when back in the private sector, but told everybody through that journey that if the right opportunity at the state or federal level came up, that I would seriously consider it. So if that was not something they could deal with, that I'm not your person. I did get called when Andrew Cuomo became the governor of the state of New York by the transition team for transportation. And there was three of us that were finalists. One got the through way as executive director. One got the OT and I got the risk manager for the tap and see. And so I was involved during the environmental and the procurement of the replacement of the tap and see bridge stated the through way became executive director. I was chief operating officer during that stint as well. So lots of interesting, but like almost true to form coming up on five years, things were getting a little dicey. So it's time to do something else. So I left. That was my first retirement. Coming back into the private sector did a couple things, but COVID really changed my thought on what I wanted to do for the last chapter or chapters of my life, my professional life. And so I got called by a recruiter from the UK about this company that is looking for some leadership in the Northeast or nationally. And they happen to have a footprint in my backyard. And like I had never even heard of GHD. I knew them as the guys who bought CRA or bought Sterns and Wheeler and they had 100 people in Niagara Falls, which is, you know, 40 miles from me and 100 people in Buffalo, like break down the street from where I had been working. And so they were really looking for somebody to elevate their brand, their how they work on projects. Because it was a lot of acquisition over the past 20 years and smaller companies still kind of acted like a franchise operation instead of a corporate entity. So we're in our 27, but yet we have an awful lot of small projects with small clients. So we're working on how do you leverage that into a big company? And so that's a lot of what I've been doing. And it was really, you're very interested in me specifically. And what, this is what our challenge is our what can you bring to bear to help us grow into this, you know, we're a multinational company almost 100 years old at this point, but we haven't been able to really hit our stride. We're hitting our stride now because a lot of the strategies that we're looking at basically economics, you know, the whole thing of if you don't invest in water for the future, how are we, you know, what the impacts are, which is something we did a couple years ago as part of our strategic plan last year. It was about the conversion, we called the campaign shocked, the conversion of going to decarbonizing energy and what happens if you don't. And you know, we, we survey and we, on that one, we work with Reuters. We serve it people around the world to be able to understand where they stand as companies or individuals leaders in our space, just community leaders and really getting an idea of what the pulse is there. So we're matching what the needs are as opposed to what we think they are. And this year the campaign is crossroads, which is looking at like the multi generational impacts of what we're seeing in climate change and infrastructure development or lack thereof. And how do we build better for the future to meet the needs of those who are going to need it and not those who are about to retire? Sure. Sure. So it's been very interesting and some of it has really been thinking about how do you bring all of our silos together? Because you know, you and your, your listeners know that engineering has its silos and you have to step back and think, how do you bring those together? So if you're a water operator, other than your personnel, your biggest expenses are energy. So if you're going to do things that are going to be more cost effective and energy, you have more money to invest in operations maintenance or in actual capital. And so finding how to unlock that money for clients is really important. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think a couple of things there for our listeners, one, you know, this position that Maria took with GHD was through the math roughly what 40 years into her career. So I say that because if you're a civil engineer and you think, hey, I'm a little stagnant in my position, you know, you can always be changing things up in your career. There's always new opportunities that can come around especially in our industry, everything going on right now. There's lots of different options. So that's one thing that I would note. And I think the other thing just, and we're going to dive into this more of the crossroads and some of the things that are going on with infrastructure. But I think just generally speaking, you can hear when Maria talks a little bit about the business side of engineering, right, the money, you know, driving value for clients, right? You know, like you said, reinvesting in one place with funds from another place. So I think that that's a big aspect of civil engineering today is yes, we're technically savvy. We know how to design things. We also have to understand the financial impacts of what we're designing and how it affects the community and jobs and everything else because that just makes us a more well-rounded civil engineer. And that's what the government agencies, professionals, people in our community are looking to us for. They're not just looking for us to design something, but we need to design something that's practical and useful for the long term that they can actually operate and pay for. So we could talk a little bit about as we dive into that Maria, but I think that part of our job as civil engineers today is not just doing, hey, here's the report and specs, but it's also understanding what the costs are going to be to the communities that take on these projects. And when I describe this, whether I'm talking, you know, to the media, whether I'm talking to elected officials, whether I'm talking to engineering groups, okay? If you have 10 engineers around the table, you're going to have 10 really good solutions to whatever the problem is at hand, technically, right? But the prism we have to look at is what are really the needs of the community? What are the social needs? How much money do they have? Can we pull money forward to be able to do more life cycle cost analysis up front? What are the chances that the O&M is going to go the way it's going to be? It needs to and if it's not, what do we bring to the table? So you're going to have to look at the economics. You're going to have to look at the environmental justice. You're going to have to look at the permitting. One job maybe, one solution may be way easier to permit. And that's money and that's getting the asset in the ground. So looking at why we select the options and engineering that we do from a holistic standpoint is something we did 100 years ago. 100 years ago, technology wasn't there where it is now. And most leaders in major companies and governments were engineers because they could absorb all this information and make good decisions. Then we got into more technical solutions. And the more technology we got, the more engineering in all the different disciplines dove deep into solving, being more cost effective, not having a factor, safety of 10, bringing it down so that you could, you know, those kinds of things. And we kind of shook their responsibility and let others take leadership in the community relative to the built environment. We let others take our space. Well, with climate change and old infrastructure, it is our ethical responsibility as a profession to step up because we do have an opinion that is an informed opinion that people need to hear as they're making their decisions. And so we tend to be much more, you know, thinking about plan A, B and C. And who's impacted and why? That's not the case with other professionals. It's just not how they're trained. It's not what they do. And so I see a great opportunity for our profession moving forward if we step up and take it. We can't let others take it away from us. So, Maria, what are the key elements that are needed to develop infrastructure that can be both durable but also sustainable from what you've seen? Okay. So I think job one is that we have to convince people to look at life cycle costs. You as a homeowner or a business that has capital investments looks at life cycle costs. They do not want to have something that's going to cost a ton of money to operate and maintain. The public sector, and this is lumpy, depends on where you are in the country, there are some examples of some really good exemplars. But by and large, the public sector wants to drive down that first instance upfront cost. And if that means there's more maintenance costs, so be it. And what's unfortunate with that is those are usually what's cut first. And so you're not meeting your design life of the asset. So looking at that upfront cost is not the best way to look at a project. You need to look at life cycle costs. And if you do that and you think about the materials that make the most sense because you're reusing and recycling, for example, it's cheaper and you don't have to landfill things. So it's thinking about that whole life cycle and how you reuse. Also from a sustainability standpoint, I can tell you that you look at environmental based design or nature based design. I mean, the leader in this in the United States right now is the US Army Corps of Engineers. Like, who to funk that? And so they're doing really interesting work. I can tell you ASC had an innovation contest that used to have both practitioners and students. It focuses on students now. But at the time, there was a group in the Gulf Coast that we're looking at how do we put in new break walls and to dissipate the energy before it gets into those, the wetlands that are disappearing and they're washing away and things like that. And they came up with the idea of basically using the shape that you would use under the shore protection manual of a break wall or a break water, right? A lot of oysters because oyster beds are stronger than reinforced concrete. And so putting them out there to be wave dissipators, and they farm the top with oysters. So you've got a sustainable oyster and you're building this thing. It's dissipating the energy and it's a natural solution. So I mean, it's a win, win, win, win, win. Very cost effective. I know they're testing in colder waters now to see how that's going to work. But thinking about if I'm using natural systems, less impact on the planet, probably more cost effective, I think about all these rainfalls we're having, these five, six inches an hour intensity, that's all getting concentrated because we put it in the pipes and they can't take it. It's too much, it's too fast. Why aren't we putting green roofs on every building we can? I mean, Vancouver uses them in their climate. There's no climate in the lower 48, they can't do that. Why aren't you doing more rain gardens and more park lands that are partial retainage of water instead of detention and retention ponds, which have to be maintained and all those stuff. So it's just thinking differently about how we approach it. And if you look at the payback, depending on what you're looking at and the lifecycle you're looking at, the payback is anywhere, $1 invested today is going to save anywhere between $6 and $90 in the future. And I've seen it all across the board and there's actually, NIST is actually working with World Bank on some specifics to have quantitative costs per year for not doing that. So you will understand what the real impacts are and hopefully in the next year or two, I mean, they're working on that modeling right now and it's very good. They're actually modeling it with some actual events. So real tools so you understand, okay, you can do this or this, but this is going to over the lifecycle cost you that much more. - Yeah, no, it's a really important point. I mean, we do at EMI, a lot of like project management training for public and private sector organizations. And we're constantly talking with PMs about this exact thing, which is if your client's trying to skimp out on the initial investment, it's really can come back to whether it's haunting or enamor the community down the road. And so that whole, the whole lifecycle is something that I know in the past people didn't think as much about they were trying to get that low cost up front. Now you have to really think about it. And some of the examples that you gave were really fast in it in like the oysters, like the natural systems, right? These are things that we need to start implementing, which is why I think civil engineering right now is so interesting because there's so many things that civil engineers can be doing today that we just weren't doing yesterday. - Correct. - It wasn't necessary, and it wasn't available. So that's why it's such an exciting profession because who knows where you're gonna work on in a couple of weeks from now? - Right. - So, in the other thing too, we haven't leveraged our partners, okay? So the financial community obviously has a lot to say. Municipal bonds, you know, Texas and municipal bonds fund a lot of what goes on in the United States. And even on federal aid quite frankly, people say, oh, federal aid, federal aid is a reimbursement. You have to have the money up front and so you're gonna have to do bond anticipation notes or whatever it is that you're doing. Financial people were pushing that to get the upfront cost down too, but they're seeing the error in their ways. There's not one infrastructure fund that hasn't seen major losses, some in the billions in the last few years. You look at projects, there's several projects that I can think of that the contractor on a P3 or on a design build operate, maintain billions lost because they weren't thinking lifecycle and things happened. So they're starting to become more and more acutely aware of the importance of this. We're actually pushing, ASC is gonna do a conference in November of this year and with the financial community, specifically kind of infrastructure for non-civil engineers, for financial folks. And the intent there is to hopefully get them to understand that if we come up with a resilient standard, which we're working on, and we have ASC E7323, which is a sustainability standard for building, but we now need a resilience. We have a couple of manuals of practice, but if we can set a baseline on that, that's antsy approved, all that neat stuff, would they be willing to lower the cost of borrowing because their risk goes down? So we used to look at design life and you really wanted useful life, which is always, if the design life's 20 years, how many bridges do we have that are 100 years old? Right? But the shorter duration is the financial life. If a hurricane knocks out a piece of infrastructure eight years into its municipal bond, there's a lot of people that invested in that that are not gonna be happy 'cause they're not gonna make their money. And so making sure that the financial life is at least as long as the design life is something we're gonna work with the financial community. And if they can find a way to, if you meet a certain standard that you're gonna get discounted money, then that public owner is gonna get what I call magic money. They're going to be able to build a more resilient asset without spending any more money because the savings they get on the cost of borrowing, they can invest upfront. - So just to follow up on this, Maria, when you talk about the finances of these projects, and like you mentioned, maybe reducing their risk potentially, who's working on that? Is it people in firms working on it? Is it ASCE? Like how are they? How is the civil engineering community able to connect with the financial community on this? Okay, so like I said, ASC, we started this conversation with a couple people that were actually interested in what ASC was doing, whether it's the report card or the failure to act or now the bridging the gap report. You know, we started getting connections from people like how can we get involved? And about six months ago, we said, you know, we really ought to bring people together and really talk about whether we can come up with some viable solutions to this. And quite frankly, the next group we're going to have to get with. And I went to finance because I know a lot of people in the financial industry is the insurance industry because that's another one that, you know, they're not underwriting things. There's certain construction bonds. They won't take now because the risks are too high. And so we have to find a way to de-risk these projects. And we certainly have the tools to do that as a profession. Yeah, for sure. It's a big, it's a big thing that's going to happen. The connection between those in the different industries here, and that right infrastructure, the finance, the civil engineer, and the insurance. It's all has to play a role. If we're on the same page, the client's going to have no choice but to listen because it's in their enlightened best interest to do so. Absolutely. So we hear a lot about climate change, of course, but with regards to infrastructure, how is climate change really impacting the urgency of updating our nation's infrastructure? Climate change, if you have, you know, I laugh, our infrastructure is not in a mid-life crisis. It's an old age crisis. So much of it is 60, 80, a hundred years old. It wasn't built for what it's taking, whether it's, you know, the stormwater, whether it's the water systems, whether it's roads and bridges. And so you're stressing them by the function of the infrastructure what it's designed for. Then you add hurricane force winds, rainfall intensities, wildfires. You know, we never thought about how we cope with wildfire at a broad scale like we're seeing now. And so when you have a weak infrastructure, it can, I mean, you saw that in what happened in Lahaina, right? None of that was designed with any kind of idea that there could be a major fire there because there was a lot of things that could have been done to help that situation. And it wasn't done because we hadn't imagined that that could happen. Now, add to that, you've got climate stressors and then you've got man-made stressors, bad actors stressors. Okay. On top of which, the systems are so much more complicated than they were just 20 years ago. So think about the tens of thousands of people that were grounded in air traffic control because of one mistake because there was no plan B. Right. And so when you look at that, so whether it's, you know, the power systems being down, you know, I laughed. I was at the county when we had the great blackout in the Northeast. And that was one operator's mistake. The whole Northeast was out of power for days. We can't have systems that some little problem brings everything down. So we have to think more holistically about that and more creatively on how we solve those problems. And so maybe our, you know, what kind of laugh? Like you look at the Brooklyn Bridge and you look at the tap and see the Brooklyn Bridge, you know, when and doubt, make it stout. And so it's doing fine. You know, over a century old, lots of new things, but it was built with such a safety factor that it's fine. I mean, it needs operations and maintenance, love. And then, you know, you look at what happened with the tap and see it was built right after the Korean War, steel prices were high, the bids came into high. So they lightened it up and it barely made its design life because of it. So we're going to have to rethink some of that stuff. And so as we're rebuilding, I don't want to rebuild something that 10 years from now is not going to meet the need. And whether that's social, whether at that's loading, whatever it is, we've got to be more creative. Interesting. All right. So tell us about the Crossroads report. Give us an overview of it and kind of talk to us about what the purpose. All right. So every year, we pick some pillar in our strategic plan that we're going to focus on. And this has to do with future communities. And, you know, how we're making a more better, a better, more sustainable planet and cities because whether we like it or not, more and more people are going to be coming to cities, whether they be mega cities or small. And, you know, we all just live through COVID and saw all the downsides of some of that, right? So you really want to think about it. So we did a survey of 13,000 people worldwide and 4,000 in the US. And we basically, it's a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of across age groups, what people's expectations are for infrastructure in the cities, right? So, you know, what are we looking at? What expectations are of people? And that gives us a better answer to our clients. So, GHD wants to be able to bring, even though a client may not have that on their radar, they certainly want to hear the best you have to offer. And so, we do these, they're independent surveys. We get a lot of work pulling it together. We're very active. I mean, GHD uses its younger professionals to do a lot of the legwork, A, because they love doing it. And it really gives them better perspective for a career-long thought process of how this matters, what you do today matters. So we found some, like, interesting things. First of all, California obviously is a progressive mindset. And people are more optimistic about the future than they are in other states, which is kind of interesting. They're open to drinking treated or recycled water. This whole thing and the water thing makes me crack up. And I'm sure it will, to your listeners, right? Oh, we're not going to drink recycled water. Well, if you live on a river, you're drinking recycled water. But the public doesn't know that, so they don't get upset. But, you know, actually, the beer industry is starting to use recycled water. And they had to do all kinds of messaging to make sure people weren't going to get upset about, you know, recycled water to make beer and the wine industry is looking at it too. But so, you know, that's one thing that they're up on it. 72% in California believe that clean energy is the right thing to do. And it's going to bring jobs and economic. And they're big, sustainability advocates in the state. Texas and California thinks that we're doing a decent job informing the public about the pluses and the minuses of climate change and why you want to do things resilient sustainability. Texas, which is kind of funny because Texas and California were the two outliers for optimism for the future. I, you know, we kind of laugh about this. Texas and California being on the same page on something's kind of interesting. But, you know, their numbers were similar as fires recycled water. They are seeing the impact of all across the world and across the United States. More than half of the survey respondents have personally felt a hit to person or where they work based on climate change. So they get it. And the other half know someone directly involved with them. So the constituencies individually know that you can't be a denier about this because we've never seen this kind of drought. We've never seen this kind of rain. We've never seen this kind of, you know, I'm at a tornado in West, you know, in I live in Orchard Park, South of Buffalo. We don't have tornadoes here. But when Hurricane barrel came through, there was a tornado in my town. We don't do anything for tornadoes. We don't have any, you know, anything for that because that's not been something that ever happened here. I've been living here for a long time. It's never been an issue. So like they have, Texas has longer commutes. And so they're looking for, you know, how do you do better with that so that you have a better quality of life and not spending it, you know, in 24 lanes of traffic, which is what the Katie freeway is in Houston. So so there was a lot of similarities, which is kind of interesting, you know, I found that very interesting. Yeah, it is interesting. So essentially what this report is kind of serving, well, I mean, there's many things that it's serving to do about one of them that I can see from a civil engineering standpoint is as a civil engineer, it would be really interesting to understand the perspectives of different, you know, locations, different age groups, right, about our infrastructure and what people want feel like they need, you know, what their understanding of the infrastructure is because those are the people we're serving. Right. So right, if you can't serve them unless you have a good feel for what they're thinking about and it can inform the way that we as civil engineers are communicating with the public. Absolutely. And the thing that's nice about this and we've seen it with like, for example, with economics that we did a couple of years ago is that we can then take those tools and maybe that survey and make it local to an authority or to a client so that they can then really get true feedback, you know, because you do a public hearing, right, and you get the vocal minority that speaks. It's very rare that you get somebody from the silent majority to say, "I really like this job and this is why," right. And so getting real information to make good investment decisions is really important. And, you know, again, we're getting this experience in this where we're really being able to better inform decision making. And I think that's, you know, capital improvements are expensive, you want to make sure they're the right ones. Yeah, no, for sure, 100%. So that's very interesting. And that's something that we will in the show notes for this episode, we'll link to the Crossroads report. You can get it on ghd.com as well, but we'll link to the specific page. So you can get it. It is really interesting. I think it provides a lot of good kind of background data, if you will, for civil engineers of what people are thinking about in terms of infrastructure. And like Maria said, it's good for us, but it's also good for us to communicate with our clients and our project stakeholders that may not have that insights, but could really benefit from it in multiple ways. Absolutely. So that's awesome. How about the bipartisan infrastructure law? Can you give us a little bit of any update you have on that kind of how it's being utilized? Okay. So there's all, I mean, there was some numbers that came out maybe a couple months ago that only 17% of the money has been spent, even though we're coming up on three years. And Maria, for those not familiar with it, this is the bill focused around water. Is that correct? No, it's all infrastructure. Oh, it's all infrastructure. Okay. Okay. Bill includes roads, bridges, airports, transit, water, wastewater. There was some parks funding. There was some broadband funding. It sees 17 categories. Every category got some amount of money. Damn, it's levies, the whole thing. The money that is flowing, people need to understand that the federal government has formulaic for a lot of infrastructure. There's formulaic allocations. And that money just goes to the state and the state has a plan, you know, they'll have under their revolving loan fund for drinking water. This is how much money we have. These are the projects we're going to do. These are the projects in line, right? Same thing with stormwater and sanitary roads and bridges go into a step, a state transportation improvement program. Right. And these are the projects we're working on. And then there's a long term plan. If we had more money, we could move these projects forward. So that is faster. 40% of the money roughly was grants. If you don't have the program now, you have to figure out what grant you're going to do, how you're going to do it. You have to go through the federal process rules making. Then you have to go put the advertisement out there. Then the grants come in. Then you have to decide who gets the money, put the money out. So it's time consuming. And so people are frustrated about that, but that's unfortunately the way it is. And you know, your viewers know you got a planet. Then you got to design it. Then you got to build it. And then you got to throw the keys over. So I think that, you know, being close to 20% three years out is really not that bad because you got to remember there's also permitting involved with a lot of this and a lot of agencies. So, and you know, even the money that went formulaic, there was a hundred and 50% increase in roads and bridges, for example, from what they were normally used to. They have to come up with a 20% match. They got to find a way to come up with that match because the intent was that it was a plus up and not a substitute, right? So if you're going to do more work, you got to come up with your match. So it's very complex, but it is hugely impacting communities around the country. I mean, there are so many projects. And this is something to talk to you to all your listeners, whether it's the the community you work in, whether it's your, who your employer is, whether it's public or private. We all have an obligation to tell those great stories because we tend to not do that on specific projects. And so the new cycle is absorbed in the bad that happens, right? The thing that fell down or the thing didn't happen fast enough or the permit that didn't happen when there's, you know, for every one thing, there's a thousand great things that happened. But we don't talk about it. And so I know ASCE with the American Council on Engineering Consultants, as well as APWA, we came together to do what we call a road show, an infrastructure road show to do events around the country about interesting projects or quite frankly, even on the getting more people into our industry. We just did one a few months ago in Washington because water in Washington, basically had this great program on how to intake people and get them because, you know, we don't have enough engineers, but we don't have enough water operators. We don't have enough bus drivers, you know, and so they focused around the water industry and had this great program where these academies where they're really getting people interested, excited and staying in those good paying careers. So it may not be a project, but we've got to talk about it. You got to get it on the local news and you've got to get it, you know, and the newsletter, you know, if you're home or as association, I mean, everywhere you can talk about it, we have to talk about it. Yeah. I mean, for me, that's why the infrastructure report cards that ASCE does and the broad sorts of important things of this nature are important because it's exposing the general public to the infrastructure needs of the country, which also can make them aware of the job opportunities for infrastructure. Right. If you put two and two together, so speak. And so I think that's important. And one of the things I should have mentioned earlier is that the bipartisan and infrastructure law, we've referred to it as many times as the infrastructure investment in jobs act or the IIAJA on the show. So if you heard us say that it's the same, there's different terms for it, I guess, but hey, the federal government loves acronyms. If you don't have one, you can have two. Right. You get up to, but listen, the fact is, like Maria said, is it is, the money's coming out. I may not be taking am I not being as quick as you'd like it to, but it is coming out. It is a government process, which we know can take some time. But we, you know, a lot of the clients that we deal with in the training world, consulting firms, they are seeing it, they are seeing it happen. Some of their DOTs and some of the agencies, and it is giving them work and keeping them busy for sure. And we hope that that sounds like that will continue. You know, like Maria said, there were start up, there were start up permitting and things of that nature that had to get it going in the beginning as well. Right. You know, the other thing I would add is ACEC has a research institute. And their last report that they put out said 51% of consulting firms are refusing jobs because they're that busy. Yes. Yes. I can attest to that with our clients that keep saying, you know, we can't hire enough people right now. We just can't keep up. They're trying to do training. They're trying to do everything. So I do think that it's, people are experiencing the projects. Okay. And maybe it's at right now at 30% or whatever it was, 20, 30%, but it's coming and coming more and you're going to have to continue to get ready for that. And there's going to be opportunities out there. There will continue to be opportunities. It's going to continue. And you know, it does, to me, it doesn't matter what administrations in power. I mean, President Trump, when he was president said we needed a trillion dollars for infrastructure. You know, he and the Congress just didn't get the pay for figured out. And so even if, you know, the ego from a democratic to a Republican administration, they talked about potentially a 10% cut across the board and federal stuff. Well, if you're at 150% and you see a 10% cut, we're still at over 135%. So that's, I mean, it's still way more than we were spending just a few years ago because both sides really understand. And you know, another example I said, because people say, you know, you know, what, what is this going to impact on our profession? The word, the Water Resources Development Act before Congress went on their summer break passed the Senate unanimously. Nothing has passed the Senate unanimously. Right. So the House and passed at the House had passed with 13 dissenting votes. Can you think of anything that has had that kind of, you know, so people get it. We have to continue to invest. And so we have to get smarter and delivery because there's a whole lot of us that are, you know, coming up on retirement and are the enrollment in civil engineering has been flat for a decade. Yes. Yes. And there's in the next decade, we're going to see 10 to 20% less high school students because we don't have that demographic. Right. So we got to figure out new ways and get this work done because this isn't going away next year or in five years or in 10 years. It's going to be complicated. I don't want to work till I'm 80. There you go. There's the plug. No, I think, you know, you're right. And like I said, these community facing initiatives can be beneficial in many ways. One, it gives us information on people's perspective, but two, it gives them exposure to what not only what's needed for us, but also there are opportunities for you, your children in this, in this industry, if you're interested in that. And hopefully people will see that and take advantage of that. And kind of, I guess one last thing I wanted to talk to you about a little bit here. A couple of points is we're talking a lot today about the government because this is, you know, the funding and you know, there's policy that goes into it. I want to just talk a little bit about the role that effective policy making place in addressing some of these long term infrastructure challenges, you know, and how can it incorporate this multi generational perspectives that we've talked a little bit about? Well, I'm going to give you an example. And I don't know if it really impacts the multi generational, but I'll give you an example of how policy matters and that a small idea from one person can really make a difference. Okay. One of the things that, um, ASE, AC, EC and NSPE, National State of Professional Engineers have been doing for over 30 years is the engineering, joint documents committee, right? So it's basically contract documents that are pretty much fill in the blank, right? And all different kinds of contracts, half lawyers, half engineers on this this committee, you know, it's a separate organization, but off three feet into it. And one of the things that we were challenged with at the beginning of this law is that there were 60,000 entities that could be eligible for bill funding. Right. And maybe 75 to 80% had never done federal work because you got to remember, like in the energy space, private companies can get this if they're doing, for example, hydrogen. Okay. So you have this whole uneducated public and you know, you get into a rural area. The town attorney is the town clerk owns the shoe store. Right. Okay. And they're coming up with contracts. Those contracts, they're grabbing from other places. They're all disparate. It's all kinds of bad words in there. Then they have to get them approved through their state because the money's coming through the state. Then they have to get approved through the why are we doing this? We have this thing. So one of the things I had spearheaded early on in my ass you think. And quite frankly, a lot of it had to do a GHD and some of the unreasonable terms and conditions we were seeing out of these, some of these contracts, whether it was contractors or clients, like this doesn't make sense. You know, I'm not going to take 100% liability if I got 10% of the design, for example. Right. And so we looked at it and I said, first of all, you can't give somebody who is not an educated consumer 100 page document. We need an infographic. Okay. So we came up with an infographic and then explaining the differences and how you can procure. So design, bid bill, design, build, what does progressive mean? Two pages, eight and a half by 11, two pages. And then we started talking to the government saying, look, for the rural utilities program, USDA said that this is the best practice, EJCDC documents. And they get the money out into these rural communities and said, well, USDA does it. Why doesn't somebody else? The end of the story is that the Volpe Center for transformative, for transformation in the transportation industry, adopted EJCDC documents as a best practice. Now they're not forcing you to use it, but they, but for the government to say, look here, this is easy, easy and we're good with it. Right. Yeah. And they included other documents in there as well. All right. That DB, there's a whole bunch of DBA documents, design, build, institute of America. So look, there's tools out there. Stop reinventing the wheel all the time because all that does is what I coined the term administrative, okay. Administrative work that doesn't do anybody any good. It waste time and money. I want to get to spending money on stealing concrete and not on, you know, computers full of files that nobody's going to ever look at again or that are going to cause claim issues in the future. So it's that kind of thing where you can take and accelerate something. We're seeing it in permitting. Now, you know, nobody wants to wreck the planet, but why does it have to be a in series process? It goes from one desk to the next and next. Why can't it go in parallel? You know, why can't we, you know, at the end have whoever the lead agency adjudicate what they're all saying and figure it out and and go? Why does it take so long? If somebody's on vacation, it sits on their desk for two weeks and no one else picks it up. What's that all about? And so it's looking at and so if you have specific things that you want to see changed, it's the bur under your saddle. You know, I don't care what organization you belong to. All the organizations are looking to provide this input to federal and state government. I know how to do better faster cheaper. And so don't just like, don't make it like the coffee water cooler talk about, I can't believe I got to do this to do something about it. Right. Yeah. Well, I think that's and that's why I bring up policy making is I think it's one area where civil engineers don't always know they can have an impact. And I know AAC is done a good job with some of the events that they do the legislative events, which are really helpful. But you can get involved in the legislation side of things as a civil engineer and you can really drive, you can make an impact, you can drive some change, you can get some stuff through faster. But if everyone says, I'm not going to be a big help. It's not just legislative. It's actually a lot of the rules that are established that were established in 1929 because it was a good idea, but we still do it. Well, why is that? If it's stupid, we should call it out as stupid and get rid of it and get something that makes more sense. So I think, you know, I mentioned to you how successful we've been with some of the legislative things with Congress, but state houses as well. And, you know, this is something that AAC does, AAC, ECE does it well, APW. I mean, they all have a component of this. And so, you know, figure out your best channel based on what you do and the clients you work for and get on board because that effort, people don't realize it doesn't take a whole lot. One of the things I learned, I was testifying in front of the Pennsylvania legislature when they were looking to do their P3 program for their bridges because they had the worst bridges in the country. And the chairman of the committee on the assembly side, in when I was doing test-to-one and questions and answers, is that why don't I hear from civil engineers? It says, there was a leash law in my district and I got 5,000 pieces of correspondence. So whether it was voicemails, emails, people mailing something in and he goes, this is really important and I've heard from like eight people. And that just like slapped me upside the head when I heard that. Like, even if you know that your legislative official is on the committee, I had a congressman back in the late 90s, early 2000s and he said, I need to have a stack. You know, I've heard from 3,000 people about this. You got to help me. So they have to hear. This is your opportunity. Yeah, that's our opportunity. There's a professional way, frankly. Yeah, for sure. So the last thing I want to ask you, Maria, because I mentioned this before a little bit and I think it's important. I think this is one of the things that you're really good at is you have the technical knowledge and you have the business finance knowledge of the projects so that you can be so that you can kind of be a really good facilitator for your projects, whether you need to interact with agencies, you need to interact with clients, you need to interact with the public. And so what advice can you give to civil engineers that can build up some of their non technical knowledge around projects finance, you know, some of the policy, what can you, what can you recommend to them? We call this power skills. Some people call it soft skills. I leaders have them so I don't consider them to be soft if you need to have them their power skills. You need to volunteer to help up your chain of command. I really need to understand more about this as there's somebody I can talk to. You need to read up on it. There's a lot of good resources out there. And volunteer, like I really want to get more involved with this. I'm going to need somebody to coach me up, but I'm interested. It's too easy when you're overburdened because you've got too much work to forget about people and let them keep just grind and crank. Okay. So when you're leading a project and you've got deadlines, you forget about your talent because well, they're doing a really good job and I don't have to do anything here. And this is my problem area here. So I'm going to focus on this. So for your own self-development, you have to step up. You have to be nice about it. We say, I'm really interested in understanding this. What are we doing that I can learn from? Or who can I talk to that's dealing with this within my agency, my company, whatever. Showing interest in a new area is never going to hurt you in your career. It's always going to help you. If your manager thinks, well, you don't need to worry. And I'm going to say this because being a woman and having heard this many times in my life, you don't need to worry your pretty little head about that. That's probably a boss that I want to get out from under as quickly as possible. So show some interest, ask people for help. It's another reason why you want to be involved professionally in your organizations because you will see who those people are. And like I said, it doesn't matter what the organization is, people are very, they're there because they're interested in helping the profession. And you can come up to very senior people and say, hey, I'm so and so. And I really like to know more about this. Can you talk to me? And they will. It's very rare that they won. So you have to be your own self advocate. Yeah. And I think that there are a tremendous amount of career benefits to doing that for yourself, your confidence building, building your power skills. Like Maria said, obviously you're building your network and you're going to know people all over the place when you start to volunteer and get involved with different, or it is and you're going to drive impact. I mean, if that's what we're not trying to do, I mean, we should all be trying to do that in our career. And I think in civil engineering, we can drive massive impact because of the number of lives that we touch on a regular basis. So so once again, Maria, Leaman Maria is licensed professional engineer. She's also the 2023 ASC national president. And she is the infrastructure lead, US infrastructure lead at GHD. We were going to link to the crossroads report from GHD and our show notes. Maria, thanks so much for joining us again on the civil engineering podcast. We always love when you stop by here. Great talking to Anthony. Something I'm very passionate about, obviously. Thank you so much Maria. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Maria. She is an amazing civil engineer and an amazing leader. And we always feel lucky to have her on the show when she's willing to come on and visit with us. Remember you can find the show notes for this episode at civilengineeringpodcast.com. There you will find the summary of the key points discussed in today's episode, as well as links to any of the resources, websites, or books mentioned during the episode. Until next time, I wish you the best in all of your civil engineering career endeavors. (upbeat music)