By Luciana Lopez — US President Donald Trump reassured manufacturers gathered in the White House Roosevelt room on March 31 that a massive infrastructure programme was coming soon. “We’re going to make it happen” this year, he said, according to Drew Greenblatt, the president of Marlin Steel in Baltimore, who was present. But putting a trillion-dollar infrastructure programme to work could be easier said than done, as some of the projects suggested to the administration underscore.
Project lists submitted by the North America’s Building Trades Unions and by an outside developer who helped with the transition both contain projects that infrastructure builders call “shovel ready.”
But, for a range of reasons, shovel ready does not always mean ready for shovels to break ground.
That means any effort to jump-start projects, put people to work and inject economic stimulus could drag on Trump’s promise for a 10-year, $1 trillion infrastructure project.
After North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) president Sean McGarvey met Trump on January 23, the group submitted a total of 26 bridge, pipeline and water projects.
A second list of 51 projects was assembled by Ohio developer Dan Slane, who assisted with the transition, including everything from inland waterways to ports to a new FBI headquarters.
While details on Trump’s plans are scant, a senior administration official said they’re looking for ways to shorten the lengthy permitting process.
“The current system has just lost its way,” he said.
Nine projects have garnered the support of both Slane and the NABTU, appearing on both lists; of those, seven have yet to start construction, and one has only done preliminary construction, highlighting how hard it is to launch infrastructure projects as quickly as Trump wants to do.
“The shovel-ready moniker that they put on projects, it’s just rarely applicable,” said Bill Miller, president and chief executive of two companies that overlap the two lists.
“To be shovel ready is incredibly expensive and time-consuming,” Miller said.
The administration says it wants to get ground broken fast.
But some of that just might be out of the president’s hands, such as state-level permitting.
“A significant part of the president’s infrastructure plan will focus on streamlining regulating and permitting so that it is easier for all viable projects to move forward in a timely manner. These reforms might not be driven by the hurdles facing a single project, but rather will create more certainty in the process overall,” a White House spokesperson said.
The delays that have beset a desalination plant proposed by Poseidon Water, a developer of water-related infrastructure, in Huntington Beach, California illustrate how clashing interests and regulations can hold up projects.
Poseidon first proposed the idea of a plant to turn salt water into drinking water for Orange County in the late 1990s and started permitting in the early 2000s, said Scott Maloni, a vice president at Poseidon and the Huntington Beach project manager.
The city of Huntington Beach originally approved the project in February 2006.
But Poseidon still needed to secure 24 permits from state agencies.
After the city issued the necessary local approvals in 2006, project builder Poseidon was able to apply to the California Coastal Commission.
That application was amended several times over the years as the project evolved.
The application was resubmitted in 2015, and then withdrawn yet again in September 2016, because the commission wanted proof the plans complied with new, 2015-passed rules from the State Water Board on desalination plants.
That compelled Poseidon to redesign the plant’s seawater intake and discharge technologies. The project still needs three more approvals. Poseidon is confident it will secure the last approvals soon.
But even then, construction might not start until the second quarter of 2018, Maloni said.— Reuters
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