With yesterday’s Earth Day top of mind for many, I have some thoughts about how we are currently in the perfect storm. Infrastructure in the United States is continuing to fail. Couple these challenges with increased drought, not enough food and water, and severe storms. This also comes while we are struggling to find skilled labor to address many of these challenges. The time is now to rebuild a more sustainable and resilient future. But what exactly does that really mean? Simply, we have a lot of work ahead of us, but opportunities abound.
The Biden-Harris Admin., aims to help with the announcement of funding earlier this month, which is allocated to strengthen surface-transportation systems and make them more resilient to extreme weather events.
The $830 million in grants will help 80 projects nationwide. As part of this, the Federal Highway Admin., is giving funding under four different grant types including planning grants, resilience improvement grants, community resilience and evacuation routes, and at-risk coastal infrastructure.
Let’s look at a few examples. In Arkansas, the City of West Memphis will receive more than $16 million to restore hundreds of acres of floodplain along the Mississippi River’s western bank using nature-based solutions such as restoring wetlands and new hardwood forests.
The cities of Philadelphia, Penn., and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, will replace bridges, while the city of Davis, Calif., will install cool pavement technologies and replace roadway underlayment. In South Dakota, the Oglala Sioux Tribe will receive $60 million to improve two sections of BIA Route 33, which crosses the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Of course, these are only a few examples. Also, it is important to note this is only the first step. While funding is critical to getting projects and jobs up and off the ground, the hard work comes next—building the resilient infrastructure of tomorrow.
In achieve this, we must consider three key steps:
- We must have the right people on the job. This is something we cover in our recent research report Who Is the Worker of Tomorrow? The report aims to get to know workers, helping to identify how to hire the right people for the job and align the business strategy with the workforce. This means understanding how and what motivates them. And what will keep them on the job.
- We must consider how new, emerging technologies will fit into the equation. We must avoid technology for technology’s sake, but we need to consider how the world is evolving. We need to leverage technologies to make our businesses more profitable. If not now, then when?
- Finally, we need to align everything together. We need to ensure we have the right workers and technologies and then we need to create a business strategy and corresponding processes that will ensure success on large-scale infrastructure projects.
Transformation is happening with the workforce and in the construction industry in general. We must prepare our business for the next evolution of work. This is the only way we are going to build the sustainable, resilient infrastructure that our communities so desperately need. How will your project team step up?
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