Will talk panelists about today. Everyone agrees America Needs to improve the efficiency of the infrastructure investments. President trump has talked about reason the cost of highly buildings so we would get more and better highways. Think that is possible. Privatization and publicprivate partnership. For example, three decades since Margaret Thatcher in britain, which has launched a global revolution in airport management. Half of europe passes airports are private. Donald trump called u. S. Airports owned by the government third world. What is donald trump going to do about that . We will see. I hope they look at International Reform trends and adopt some of these reform styles here in the United States for infrastructure. Our panel survey will discuss with trump may do and can do with infrastructure reform. In my own writing on of theructure, on all speakers today, i would encourage you to go to the website of the Institution Representative here today to learn more about infrastructure. Speakers anduce then get it going. Is a researchker fellow at the American Public policy institute. For many years, ron was at the Heritage Foundation and was the go to guy on infrastructure. When i write about transportation issues, i always go back to look and see what ron said to make sure i am on the right track. In the reagan administration, ron was the associate director from 1987 to 1989. Ron has a phd from indiana university. Our next speaker will be marked, a senior fellow at the competitive enterprise institute. Mark writes about infrastructure investment, privatization, and innovations such as Automated Vehicles and Unmanned Aircrafts. Marks writings on aircraft control are crucial to the current debate about air Traffic Control reform, which i think will be a big topic of discussion this year. Mark received an undergraduate degree in economic philosophy. Third speaker is assistant director of transportation policy at reason foundation. Hill, hey on capitol handled capital issues for west moreland. He earned a masters degree in. Ity and Regional Planning our cleanup speaker this morning expert ontos own urban growth come planning, and issues, a book and studies on those topics over the years. Local transportation choices. See on light rails i the speakers will talk for 10 minutes. Ron thank you for inviting me to be here today. It is an interesting time to talk about of the structure. Hillary clinton announced she was in favor of half a chilean dollar Infrastructure Spending proposal that she believed would create great jobs and get the American Economy on the move again. From isater, candidate in favor of a trillion dollar infrastructure plan. Since that date, there has not been much detail provided on that. It also gives us a chance to do recommending. You have a 1nce trillion infrastructure plan, would you set off in america and globally a huge money scramble. The money scramble has already started. The National Governors association provided a white house with over 400 Shovel Ready Projects that are ready to go totaling about 120 billion. Senator schumer has come out with the oppositions plan also for a trillion dollars, which you would expect. Is largely oriented toward his particular constituency. Trump, mores donald and more of these things are coming through as everyone believes there will be a huge amount of money on the table and they want to get it. An important thing that trump has let us know and the few details he has is that it will be incentivized by 137 billion of tax credits to encourage the private sector to get more involved in infrastructure, providing the management and presumably the operation of these things. This raises an important issue in infrastructure in america. Really have two kinds of infrastructure. Private infrastructure when i say infrastructure, we are typically talking about longlived assets to provide this society and people with the flow of useful services. The private infrastructure, we have housing and retail, shopping centers, hotels, notforprofit hospitals, refinery, airlines, and so on. Infrastructure, we have roads, transit, air Traffic Control, and so on. There is a difference between first and second and it is not just ownership. The items listed in the first are not cited as a problem and if anything, you tend to overproduce that kind of infrastructure. Many policies in america are designed to curb food production. It is difficult without getting ifroval because otherwise, anything, housing production, as they tend to create cycles. These are where we have deficiencies, where we have conditions,errible potholes, technically obsolete. Water systems that dont work. And this is where a lot of people talk about the infrastructure crisis. Is it a crisis of socialism since all of the things that are all the things that lend themselves to easy solutions year after year are in fact publicly owned. Not to be pursued received as a problem. Capitalism versus socialism. We need to make that distinction very clear. Since there will be a huge money how will we make decisions about these projects. That the threat is public in the house may likely this year than earmarks. They simply put the issue off until later this year. I think it will be a freeforall because Congress Wants to be part of the action as well. My suggestion is you start to look at mechanisms already toated and implemented rationalize Infrastructure Projects because many more proposals then you will ever have money to do. An example of that is one just implement it in virginia. It has now been operating for two years, to create a performancebased system for selecting Infrastructure Projects. Roads,udes transit and but Something Like this can easily be done for wastewater treatments and airports and so on. It is the idea of coming up with an objective costbenefit standard to rank projects by their particular value. In 2014, virginia and acted how actually, which was implemented in 2016 for the first time. Mitigation is one of six factors considered in any project. Congestion mitigation must predominate in urbanized areas and the facts are weighted by region. Smartogram is now called scale. Accessibility, environmental quality, Economic Development and land use coordination. Since all parts of the state are problems, theheir state has been divided up into four different regions. In category a, which includes three metropolitan areas in the one ofhampton roads, virginia passes suburbs and fredericksburg, part of Northern Virginia at this point, congestion mitigation counts for 45 percent for a particular project. Projection must dominate. Other factors are relatively minor in comparison. Cities, get to smaller other factors take over. When you get to categories see nd, congestion counts for virtually nothing. They do not have a congestion problem. The reason for this is to hold all regions harmless in terms of the money they get from the state. We Start Talking about congestion mitigation to rural officials, wed will ship all the money to more everybodythis allows to tailor the state money to the particular needs of their community. In each factor, we have several sub factors. Access to jobs, the most , and multiple. Hoices, the transit industry Economic Development we have support for Economic Development, travel time reliability which also relates to congestion mitigation. Forth ourojects put new projects or substantially revitalized projects that will cover the next six years. It includes transit. Local governments submit their itsfic projects, then if court according to the scale. The commonwealth transportation board, essentially a political board, either accept them or makes changes as appropriate. We have done this in virginia for 2016 and 2017. Of the 8. 5 billion worth of only 2. 7submitted, billion are actually approved for 2017. They have been announced so far. Those were the losers. Is asmart scale process position. Everyone is happy. The elected officials who voted for it are pleased. It seems to be working. See of the things i can make sense in terms of keeping or getting rid of. What is important, in closing, is the quantitative measures are only as valuable as what goes into them. What goals you set for yourself. In the case of virginia, congestion mitigation is a very serious problem in the two major metropolitan areas of the country. Example has a different political philosophy and we just came up with their set of proposals. Not only are they proposals for guidelines but active in legislation. It means the government cannot change anything or violates the law. As you can imagine with a liberal legislature in maryland, the scale factors are largely prolocking. Almost impossible under the standard for maryland blt to approve any highway projects. This is a real problem. It is enacted in the law. He sent it back and came back with a veto and majority. If you are not careful, it can really backfire on you. Looking forward to any questions later on. Thanks. Mark hi, everybody. Thank you ron, and thank you, chris, for moderating. To, we had the issue of trying to find 1 trillion worth of Infrastructure Projects in the next 10 years, and this is coming from both parties. What i want to talk about today is getting the most bang for the buck and trying to shift some of the project risks away from taxpayers. You have heard speaker ryan and thatr mcconnell both say 1 trillion will not be 1 trillion worth of federal spending. The areas i will talk about most bang for the your buck out of infrastructure investment, finance reform and regulatory reform. With respect to financing, an important distinction between finance and funding, financing entitiesthe government with a private sector partner enter the credit markets and use Debt Financing to construct ,hese Infrastructure Projects coming right out of the treasury. These can and do shift costs away from the general taxpayer. One problem for increasing private sector involvement in to sector, they are able access Municipal Bonds while the private sector generally does not enjoy such a tax advantage. The ideal solution here is to ,evel finance eliminate the tax the secondbest solution here is to expand publicprivate partnerships. We already have a thing called private activity bonds in the 2000 five hwy bill reauthorization. What paths to do is allow the private sector to borrow in a way similar to the Public Sector. Of 15a lifetime cap billion, and as of january 23 of the year, a quarter to the federal highway administration, 10. 8 6 billion has already been allocated. Andthe Administration Congress to greatly increase financing, the cap is going to need to be raised substantially. There is a solution of lifting the cap while expanding asset eligibility and the types of projects eligible to receive passage, now basically limited to transportation projects. We already have an example and the Current Administration can look at the past administration which had a proposal 2016 which would have been qualified and that would have expanded eligible projects into airports, water and wastewater systems, and eliminated the expiration date. If the goal is increasing private Sector Investment infrastructure in the near term, a new bond framework should be created to level the financing between the public and fight and private sectors. This would be Public Financing anorm, but, we have authorization bill. One thing we would like to see is modernizing the facility charge, a local airport user charge, and it helps to reduce the federal taxpayer burden. At a maximum and that has been unchanged since 2000. Inflation has eroded about half of the buying power. Many airports are approaching the debt limits. If we were to modernize the psc to eliminate the cap and allow the airports to raise passenger facility charge, those revenues can be used to back on. Allowing the airports to reaccess credit markets soon to be shut out of it. Large airports have said for give they are willing to up their federal Improvement Program grants and exchange. Fortunately, last week, we saw , thelation introduced thomas, amber, and republican member of the committee, and they will also report shall he did reduce funding. Reform,n to regulatory i will go brought on what we should do to move in a general positive direction. Get specific at the end. Many know the executive border,igned by president clinton whenever possible, to specify performance objectives rather than the behavior or manner or compliance. This performancebased approach to regulation has been encouraged for many years now. Despite attempts to move away from the more descriptive safety regulations at d. O. T. , the best he d. O. T. Have at best been uneven in their approach. That is the Safety Administration which regulates auto safety in the United States. Their crash standards are generally performancebased. They are not telling you how to design your airbags. Y set a forced fresh hold threshold and automakers can decide how to meet the standards with whatever technology they want. Script safety certification rules that have been on the books for many years, we did see in recent months small aircraft certification reform that moved in this performancebased direction. Unfortunately, when we see things like Emergent Technology especially Unmanned Aircraft systems, you are seeing the faa continue to churn out very onerous rules that restrict also is of operations and the only way around those is to request and receive a waiver or that is a very difficult process. The federal Railroad Administration has some rules. Late 2006, carrnative Passenger Rail crashworthiness standards that would have adapted a performancebased approach and allowed the introduction of new technologies that could have improved lives of the design of american cars. Proposal,loping that in 2016, they also proposed a rule that would that would require a crew. That cuts against the mandate , positivea technology, communications and Automation Technologies that one of the business benefits that were cited in the past is reducing crew sizes. The same way we are moving toward self driving cars, in the future there is no reason we shouldnt be able to move toward self driving terrains. And is clearly clinical that is the thing, the rules that dont allow the uptake, driving up costs and disadvantaging consumers. I think congress should require in legislation a copperheads of regulatory review of the agencys safety regulations and develop performancebased remaininges to prescriptive rules and also require all new rules be outcome based. Paid tocare needs to be some of these emerging technologies that they not be subject to regulations at this time. Driving cars are not but they soon will be. There is a risk of adopting nontechnology neutral prescriptive standards that could really cause us to forgo the many benefits that knowledge is promise us for the future. , the name specific rules national highway traffic and Safety Administration via all communications proposed rule which would specify a specific technology and at warning drivers of hazards. The problem with the rule is it does not allow alternative compliance with alternative technologies. Rise ofes the automation, where you can actually have a computer directly avoid these collisions rather than just providing a whether that is tactile feedback in the Steering Wheel or something to the driver. It makes no sense and should also be withdrawn. Be the example would transportation boards proposed reciprocal switching change. They basically had railroads which were largely deregulated for aboutly 1980s, 30 years, you had a standard that required a showing of any competitive conduct on the part of the railroads in order for the Surface Transportation Board to force railroads to interchange each others traffic. There has been no evidence of any conduct in the part of the railroads. The solution to this was to eliminate the conduct requirement and allow it to arbitrarily propose these switching arrangements. It is another example of patience is going in the wrong simultaneously being able to go in a more sensible economic performancebased direction. Trump, in his joint session to congress address, said, you know, he did tell private financing, which i thought was good, there were no specifics, but at least he was talking about it, one thing that did trouble me is one of the two principles he said would guide his infrastructure plan are by america provisions. All this will do is needlessly drive up the cost of Infrastructure Projects. We have seen this play out before with the stimulus under president obama. You saw between 2009 and 2011, steel and iron provisions. Increase by 5. 7 billion, i believe. It is pure waste. The money could have been used for other projects. It is the exact opposite direction we want to be going. Under federal Credit Assistance such such as private activity bonds, the private sector partner would be required to put abide by these provisions unless they receive a waiver. The call to strengthen that cuts against the presi