A panel featuring former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood discussed various aspects of America’s ongoing infrastructure crisis.
Students from the engineering and business colleges banded together to a host a panel discussion titled “The Future of American Infrastructure: Combining Engineering and Economics to Tackle Our Nation’s Serious Transportation Problems” Tuesday from 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m.
“America is one big pothole at this point,” LaHood, a Bradley alum said, before saying the United States has over 60,000 structurally deficient bridges. LaHood laid out a plan for the restoration of America’s infrastructure that included raising taxes on gasoline and emphasized the necessity of committed leadership at the highest levels of federal government.
Other members of the panel had different focuses. Kensil Garnett, the engineer for the Illinois Department of Transportation’s Region 3, clarified some of the structural issues faced by our infrastructure and pointed out that the Department of Transportation was on the lookout for new recruits.
Joshua Lewer, the chair of the Bradley Economics Department, described the devastating effects poor infrastructure can have on social mobility.
Karen Jensen, president and CEO of Peoria’s Farnsworth Group, said a lack of routine maintenance could increase costs in the long term. Eric Hansen, a Bradley alumnus and vice president of engineering firm Crawford, Murphy and Tilly Inc., shared a suggestion that citizens should pay for the use of roads like they pay for any other utility, in the form of a vehicle mileage tax.
LaHood said the American Civil Liberties Union, among other organizations, has already objected to the idea of privacy concern.
“I found it fascinating to see the different perspectives,” said Ben Wagoner, a sophomore political science and economics double major. “I just felt that it was an all-encompassing panel that was able to answer … every question [and] every side of the issue at hand.”
The panel was hosted by a mixed group of engineering and business students and represented a spirit of cooperation engendered by the upcoming combination of the two colleges into the new Business and Engineering Complex.
“The dean of the Student Advisory Council in the Foster College of Business reached out to me to host any sort of event with the engineering organizations here on campus,” said Nick Brusich, a junior economics major and president of the Economics Roundtable at Bradley. “So I reached out to the civil engineers, and the first thing I thought of was … infrastructure.”
He reached out to senior civil engineering majors Grant Hischke and Cody Gastel, vice president and president, respectively, of the Bradley chapter of American Society of Civil Engineers. Both students agreed that infrastructure formed an obvious combination of the two subjects.
“When you build a road, when you build a bridge, when you build a rail line, you are building an economic corridor,” LaHood said. “So the connection between engineering and economics is so critical.”
