Transcripts For CSPAN White House Adviser Mitch Landrieu On

Advisor and former new mayor mitch andrew talks about building for structure. He spoke at an event hosted by the American Enterprise institute. [indistinct conversations] thank you for being here. Normally, i go into i am the professor at the school of public policy, by the way. Our banner is outside Cornell University and professor of economics at cornell. Nonresident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute Since the early 1990s and i go into a long discussion thanking the adi for all they have done for me over the decades in terms of supporting my research. Today i want to make efficient use of our time together. Our esteemed guest has a tight schedule given what is going on in the infrastructure world. By the way, founding director of the Cornell Program or cpip and i urge you to google cpip cornell and see what we are doing. I want to get directly to mayor Mitch Landrieus comments as quickly as we can. I will do an and introduction. He served as the 61st mayor of new orleans from 2010 until 2018. When he took office the city was still recovering from Hurricane Katrina and the middle of the bp oil spill. Under mayor landrieus leadership new orleans is recognized as one of the nations greatest comeback stories. In 2015, mayor landrieu was named public official of the year by governing magazine. In 2016, he was voted americas top turnaround mayor in a politico survey. Mayor landrieu gained National Attention for his powerful decision to take down four confederate monuments in new orleans, which earned him the john f. Kennedy profile in courage award. In his book, a white southerner confronts history, he recounts his personal journey confronting the issue of race and racism in america. In 2018, he launched E Pluribus Unum for justice and opportunity for all by breaking down the barriers that divide us by race and class. Prior to serving as mayor he served two terms as Lieutenant Governor and 16 years in the state legislature. Regarding education, he holds a ba from Catholic University and jd from loyola. He and his wife live in new orleans where they raised their five children. Amazing you have time for anything else but parenting. [laughter] i have two and that takes my time. He will discuss the infrastructure and jobs act of 2021 which was passed last november. Thank you for coming. We look forward to your remarks. Thank you so much. [applause] mayor landrieu great to be with you and i want to thank you for having me here. I never come here without paying homage to my professor. He was my College Professor and i had the great joy of having lunch and reacquainting ourselves. Really one of the great thinkers in american politics and expert in congressional politics which we need. Great to be with all of you. The president asked me to come up and help implement the infrastructure bill. I was a legislator for 16 years which gave me a certain perspective in terms of advocating to the executive branch to do and not do things and i served on the ways and means committee. The committee on the house side that actually doled out the money for projects. I had a little bit of insight. I later became Lieutenant Governor of the state of louisiana. In louisiana, Lieutenant Governor is a moderately powerful Lieutenant Governor. In some states, like texas, it is a lot, but i oversaw the tourism sector. It became somewhat of a de facto ambassador ship. Katrina hit during that period. We had katrina, rita, ike, gustav, and then the recession. I took office two weeks after the bp oil spill. Most of my time as an executive in the city of new orleans in the state of louisiana has been responding to disasters. Trying to find a way to get state and local authorities to get together with the private sector to rebuild catastrophic consequences from either manmade or natural disasters. I say manmade because katrina was manmade. You all watched the hurricane come in and out but if you know anything about hurricanes, most of the time we have hurricane parties. We sit on the porch and we have wine and the wind goes out. [laughter] we dustup the leaves and we are all fine. The cocktail. Mayor landrieu the cocktail called the hurricane which is also destructive, like many hurricanes are. [laughter] but every 10 or 30 years, much more frequently, you get camille, katrina, maria, ida, etc. We are familiar with them now. And there is often catastrophic consequences. When katrina came in and went out it was not until after katrina went out the levees broke. That is when the catastrophic event in new orleans that was an infrastructure failure. Those who built and designed those levees and they failed under intense pressure and the city sat with 17 feet of water a good three or four weeks. If you sat underwater three or four weeks, you would get her to. The pressure on the city was in normas. It blew out if you sat underwater three or four weeks, you would get hurt too. The pressure on the city was enormous. It blew out the sewer system. I had to figure out how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. When the president said to come up, i was thrilled to have the opportunity to help the country figure out how to do something we have not done well together for a long time. Of course, the infrastructure progress is going on all over the country. But nothing of this consequence. This is 1. 2 trillion dollars, that is a lot of zeros. The biggest thing we have done in terms of direct federal investments since eisenhower built the interstate system. There is quite a lot to do together to figure out when i say build the mousetrap figure out how to get it done and make sure whatever comes out of the ground is what we designed. We have to think about what we want to build, how are we going to build, who is going to do it, and hope we come in on time and on budget. I am doing three things. I am putting a team together. We are getting money out the door and we are going to tell the story. I am getting the team together. It is not just the federal team but that is the first team. 14 cabinet departments have meetings on fairly regular basis. We coordinate the activities so the private sector does not have to go to 15 different places to figure out how to lay highSpeed Internet. I have talked to every governor in the country and asked them on behalf of the president to implement infrastructure coordinators, which is i have done, and i have talked to the mayors. Clean up the air and water, superfund sites, clean up the great lakes, get rid of the lead in the pipes poisoning our kids, and building a Clean Energy Economy which is unto itself. That has been added onto by the Inflation Reduction Act which is the largest investment of climate infrastructure in the United States of america. You can imagine all the players that have to be in the room at 50 different times in 50 different places to design what is out of the ground. That is the scope of the plan. In the last one year, coming up on the oneyear anniversary, we have pushed 180 billion out of the door. We are all trying to turbocharge the way we Work Together so that that can grow exponentially in the years to come. Thats great. Thank you, mayor. We could probably talk all afternoon and evening about everything going on with the bill. But lets focus on key things. One of the things here at the Educational Institution is publicsector capacity. That is the understanding of public owners, state and local governments, about how the bill works and how they should apply for the money, how they should receive the money. How do you think it is going overall . Mayor landrieu in my world, there were enormous expectations. How is that going given these capacity issues . Mayor landrieu first of all, the first question is what is the expectation . The expectation is in a year we would be rebuilding the whole country. That would be trouble. If the understanding is we have not been doing well for a long time and we have to rebuild and get better at building big things again, i think it is going pretty well. As you begin to dig into this thing, when you put pressure into a system, the first thing you see is the hole in the system. What do we have the capacity to do . What do we not have the capacity to do . Who is not showing up . What is this analysis . The good part of this is it is this is the first time we have spent this much money. We have a good schematic set up and we have experience which is , we just not have done it on this level. We have a lot of challenges but three big ones. The one that is ubiquitouss workforce. We dont have enough people to do all the work America Needs done. 10 million jobs have been created since the president has been in office, the Unemployment Rate is the lowest it has been. Everybody in america that wants to work is working and that is a good thing. That is a good problem to have as opposed to the other went. Be that as it may, whether it is we have 500,000 vehicle charging stations. We have to lay down fiberoptic cables so we have to train people to do that. 80 is digging and the other 20 is the technology piece. Recreating the way we drive by having batteryoperated cars. Every major automotive manufacturer in the world has said we are moving into batteryoperated vehicles. That is a nice thing to say and wonderful as everybody thinks, i will show up and buy my car and not think about, how are we going to get from soup to nuts . Where we going to get the minerals . Who is going to process them . How are we going to manufacture the Component Parts and who is going to do it . Who was going to build the batteries . Who will put them in the cars and where the manufacturers going to be . We have gone through that discussion with the private sector to get that done. That is important. But when you just kind of step back and ask yourself, is there a readymade workforce that is already trained to do each one of those things . The answer is no. We have to build the plane while we are flying. That is the number one challenge we have. I have no doubt we are going to get there. It is not like you pass the bill and say, lets show up and get it done. You have to design the whole thing. The second thing is because we want to make sure people do not get left behind. The president s view is that everybody in America Needs to be included. What does that mean . If we push all the money out of the door tomorrow and said the people most sophisticated, come get your money, all of the big cities that have the biggest staffs would get everything and you would not be able to get money to an ittybitty town in alabama. Getting Technical Expertise to the ground in communities that have been left out has been critically important. The third one near and dear to your heart and all of you in this room is how you get permits done to get the work out of the door. All of us are thinking through, how do we build faster but do it with value . What in the world has been going on to take us so long and cost us so much to do thing in the u. S. . Those are the three big things. There are a thousand different positive and negative things but in the broad scheme of things, when you are looking back and saying, how my going to triage this going out . Those of the things we are spending time trying to figure out with private sector partners. Thank you, mayor. Good answer. I grew up in new york about an hour and 10 minutes north of syracuse. I have been on the elevated highway that goes through syracuse and is an interchange for those who have not been on it. I have been underneath it and it is not fun to be underneath. What effects do we expect or are you seeing . President eisenhower, height of the cold war, the idea was partly defense to create a system of highways for moving military vehicles fast around the United States which we did not have prior. I think that was because it was eisenhowers vision. We did a quick and shallow. We did not build as deep as the german audubon but we cut through cities and we routed a lot of interstate highways in ways we would not do today. What effects are you seeing or do you expect to see the system is old. 1956 was a long time ago. What will he see in terms of fixing some of that if we were to rebuild the interstate highway today . Mayor landrieu one of the incredible things about our country is we are constantly reimagining ourselves. Constantly adapting to new challenges and opportunities. We always have a chance to course correct which is a process of constant and total renewal. I dont want to condemn the entire system. I am not condemning it either. [laughter] mayor landrieu no. It was built fast and in some large measure, it was necessary. I think looking back all of us can agree that we ran through some neighborhoods we should not have run through. We never really thought much about what the consequence was going to be of that design as we played out. Now that many of them are come in they have to be replaced or repaired, some people are thinking about, why dont we think about reconnecting neighborhoods that have gotten separated. Africanamerican neighborhoods and indigenous neighborhoods or poor hispanic neighborhoods, some he sliced them in half. The big consequence was there is a wall. Everybody knows this. If you are in the south, and im sure this is true in the north although you blame the south for everything. [laughter] you can notice that chip on my shoulder. Do you want to go there . [laughter] mayor landrieu if you slice a neighborhood in half and you put a wall up, the folks that used to live and be neighbors never see each other anymore. You is this the right the culture and it changes it and pushes it into a whole new way. There is about 4 billion in this bill, 1 billion in the infrastructure law and another in the Inflation Reduction Act, whose purpose is to ask cities and states to think about redesigning many of those neighborhoods that have been dissected and put them back together to grow the economy from the ground up. Ithaca is one of them. I toured one in denver the other day on i 70. Your mind goes, they cannot really do that. It would mess everybody up and nobody can get it done on time. We have a lot of smart architects and engineers and folks that can do this in a beautiful way. This project on i70 is incredible. Old hispanic neighborhood was separated by a massive highway. It completely destroyed the community. They have taken a quartermile of it and dug a tunnel underneath it. They flatten the surface where the cars used to go and turned into an amphitheater, park, soccer field and literally reconnected the school where the kids play through the yard with all the small businesses. It increase to private Sector Investment twofold. As the mayor of a city i can tell you how you design the city is going to dictate how people move. Function follows design and it is absolutely possible in this country to build something beautiful that lifts people up that functions well. But from a National Security perspective what will take care of the concerns when they built the interstates we will get smarter and better at it and figure out how to make the country more united based on the way we design infrastructure across the country. Thank you. One of the things i observed in my capacity is there is what i call a quiet technological revolution going on in infrastructure delivery. It does not get the headlines of facebook or google or these big companies, but there is new materials, new designs. It is not like 1956. There is a construction site that is highly automated. But there is all these technologies proving patented that will improve the performance of the infrastructure. They kind of need to be wrapped into the proposal, into the delivery of the infrastructure. Are you seeing those technologies adopted in the project you are touring around the country . Mayor landrieu the answer is yes. When i say we have to get better at this, once you have this amount of money flowing down, this opportunity that people have to actually hone their craft and there is pressure on them to do it differently. To build with resilience in mind. I have told you im from new orleans. When the bridges crashed, we did not build the bridge again. We built it high with different material. We built it in a way of resilience. This is in everybodys mind. The idea of cybersecurity in everybodys mind. The idea of climate is in everybodys mind. It is testing all the young folks graduating in architecture and engineering and product many factoring. All those people have been given license to think outside the box and come up with new materials, and new kinds of asphalt, all of those things happening exponentially when it never used to happen before because of the plethora of work getting done. I left a meeting at the white house where we brought together all of the Major Companies and said, when you are thinking about Manufacturing Products that are going to be Component Parts going into ev stations, we need to think about this from a National Security perspective. How we build in the technology to beat cybersecurity threats. That intense designing and communication is taking place because we know we are in a challenging environment. The same is true of her building electric grid. It is not just building it back stronger but safer and that means different materials. There is this huge wave of innovation going on across the country in the public and private sector. This is great. I have to followup because i wrote a book many years ago on publicprivate partnership. But they extend to other types of infrastructure and i think part of the Infrastructure Investment in jobs act includes an increase on the cap. There are other things in the act. I tell my class the American Enterprise<\/a> institute. [indistinct conversations] thank you for being here. Normally, i go into i am the professor at the school of public policy, by the way. Our banner is outside Cornell University<\/a> and professor of economics at cornell. Nonresident scholar at the American Enterprise<\/a> Institute Since<\/a> the early 1990s and i go into a long discussion thanking the adi for all they have done for me over the decades in terms of supporting my research. Today i want to make efficient use of our time together. Our esteemed guest has a tight schedule given what is going on in the infrastructure world. By the way, founding director of the Cornell Program<\/a> or cpip and i urge you to google cpip cornell and see what we are doing. I want to get directly to mayor Mitch Landrieus<\/a> comments as quickly as we can. I will do an and introduction. He served as the 61st mayor of new orleans from 2010 until 2018. When he took office the city was still recovering from Hurricane Katrina<\/a> and the middle of the bp oil spill. Under mayor landrieus leadership new orleans is recognized as one of the nations greatest comeback stories. In 2015, mayor landrieu was named public official of the year by governing magazine. In 2016, he was voted americas top turnaround mayor in a politico survey. Mayor landrieu gained National Attention<\/a> for his powerful decision to take down four confederate monuments in new orleans, which earned him the john f. Kennedy profile in courage award. In his book, a white southerner confronts history, he recounts his personal journey confronting the issue of race and racism in america. In 2018, he launched E Pluribus Unum<\/a> for justice and opportunity for all by breaking down the barriers that divide us by race and class. Prior to serving as mayor he served two terms as Lieutenant Governor<\/a> and 16 years in the state legislature. Regarding education, he holds a ba from Catholic University<\/a> and jd from loyola. He and his wife live in new orleans where they raised their five children. Amazing you have time for anything else but parenting. [laughter] i have two and that takes my time. He will discuss the infrastructure and jobs act of 2021 which was passed last november. Thank you for coming. We look forward to your remarks. Thank you so much. [applause] mayor landrieu great to be with you and i want to thank you for having me here. I never come here without paying homage to my professor. He was my College Professor<\/a> and i had the great joy of having lunch and reacquainting ourselves. Really one of the great thinkers in american politics and expert in congressional politics which we need. Great to be with all of you. The president asked me to come up and help implement the infrastructure bill. I was a legislator for 16 years which gave me a certain perspective in terms of advocating to the executive branch to do and not do things and i served on the ways and means committee. The committee on the house side that actually doled out the money for projects. I had a little bit of insight. I later became Lieutenant Governor<\/a> of the state of louisiana. In louisiana, Lieutenant Governor<\/a> is a moderately powerful Lieutenant Governor<\/a>. In some states, like texas, it is a lot, but i oversaw the tourism sector. It became somewhat of a de facto ambassador ship. Katrina hit during that period. We had katrina, rita, ike, gustav, and then the recession. I took office two weeks after the bp oil spill. Most of my time as an executive in the city of new orleans in the state of louisiana has been responding to disasters. Trying to find a way to get state and local authorities to get together with the private sector to rebuild catastrophic consequences from either manmade or natural disasters. I say manmade because katrina was manmade. You all watched the hurricane come in and out but if you know anything about hurricanes, most of the time we have hurricane parties. We sit on the porch and we have wine and the wind goes out. [laughter] we dustup the leaves and we are all fine. The cocktail. Mayor landrieu the cocktail called the hurricane which is also destructive, like many hurricanes are. [laughter] but every 10 or 30 years, much more frequently, you get camille, katrina, maria, ida, etc. We are familiar with them now. And there is often catastrophic consequences. When katrina came in and went out it was not until after katrina went out the levees broke. That is when the catastrophic event in new orleans that was an infrastructure failure. Those who built and designed those levees and they failed under intense pressure and the city sat with 17 feet of water a good three or four weeks. If you sat underwater three or four weeks, you would get her to. The pressure on the city was in normas. It blew out if you sat underwater three or four weeks, you would get hurt too. The pressure on the city was enormous. It blew out the sewer system. I had to figure out how to put Humpty Dumpty<\/a> back together again. When the president said to come up, i was thrilled to have the opportunity to help the country figure out how to do something we have not done well together for a long time. Of course, the infrastructure progress is going on all over the country. But nothing of this consequence. This is 1. 2 trillion dollars, that is a lot of zeros. The biggest thing we have done in terms of direct federal investments since eisenhower built the interstate system. There is quite a lot to do together to figure out when i say build the mousetrap figure out how to get it done and make sure whatever comes out of the ground is what we designed. We have to think about what we want to build, how are we going to build, who is going to do it, and hope we come in on time and on budget. I am doing three things. I am putting a team together. We are getting money out the door and we are going to tell the story. I am getting the team together. It is not just the federal team but that is the first team. 14 cabinet departments have meetings on fairly regular basis. We coordinate the activities so the private sector does not have to go to 15 different places to figure out how to lay highSpeed Internet<\/a>. I have talked to every governor in the country and asked them on behalf of the president to implement infrastructure coordinators, which is i have done, and i have talked to the mayors. Clean up the air and water, superfund sites, clean up the great lakes, get rid of the lead in the pipes poisoning our kids, and building a Clean Energy Economy<\/a> which is unto itself. That has been added onto by the Inflation Reduction Act<\/a> which is the largest investment of climate infrastructure in the United States<\/a> of america. You can imagine all the players that have to be in the room at 50 different times in 50 different places to design what is out of the ground. That is the scope of the plan. In the last one year, coming up on the oneyear anniversary, we have pushed 180 billion out of the door. We are all trying to turbocharge the way we Work Together<\/a> so that that can grow exponentially in the years to come. Thats great. Thank you, mayor. We could probably talk all afternoon and evening about everything going on with the bill. But lets focus on key things. One of the things here at the Educational Institution<\/a> is publicsector capacity. That is the understanding of public owners, state and local governments, about how the bill works and how they should apply for the money, how they should receive the money. How do you think it is going overall . Mayor landrieu in my world, there were enormous expectations. How is that going given these capacity issues . Mayor landrieu first of all, the first question is what is the expectation . The expectation is in a year we would be rebuilding the whole country. That would be trouble. If the understanding is we have not been doing well for a long time and we have to rebuild and get better at building big things again, i think it is going pretty well. As you begin to dig into this thing, when you put pressure into a system, the first thing you see is the hole in the system. What do we have the capacity to do . What do we not have the capacity to do . Who is not showing up . What is this analysis . The good part of this is it is this is the first time we have spent this much money. We have a good schematic set up and we have experience which is , we just not have done it on this level. We have a lot of challenges but three big ones. The one that is ubiquitouss workforce. We dont have enough people to do all the work America Needs<\/a> done. 10 million jobs have been created since the president has been in office, the Unemployment Rate<\/a> is the lowest it has been. Everybody in america that wants to work is working and that is a good thing. That is a good problem to have as opposed to the other went. Be that as it may, whether it is we have 500,000 vehicle charging stations. We have to lay down fiberoptic cables so we have to train people to do that. 80 is digging and the other 20 is the technology piece. Recreating the way we drive by having batteryoperated cars. Every major automotive manufacturer in the world has said we are moving into batteryoperated vehicles. That is a nice thing to say and wonderful as everybody thinks, i will show up and buy my car and not think about, how are we going to get from soup to nuts . Where we going to get the minerals . Who is going to process them . How are we going to manufacture the Component Parts<\/a> and who is going to do it . Who was going to build the batteries . Who will put them in the cars and where the manufacturers going to be . We have gone through that discussion with the private sector to get that done. That is important. But when you just kind of step back and ask yourself, is there a readymade workforce that is already trained to do each one of those things . The answer is no. We have to build the plane while we are flying. That is the number one challenge we have. I have no doubt we are going to get there. It is not like you pass the bill and say, lets show up and get it done. You have to design the whole thing. The second thing is because we want to make sure people do not get left behind. The president s view is that everybody in America Needs<\/a> to be included. What does that mean . If we push all the money out of the door tomorrow and said the people most sophisticated, come get your money, all of the big cities that have the biggest staffs would get everything and you would not be able to get money to an ittybitty town in alabama. Getting Technical Expertise<\/a> to the ground in communities that have been left out has been critically important. The third one near and dear to your heart and all of you in this room is how you get permits done to get the work out of the door. All of us are thinking through, how do we build faster but do it with value . What in the world has been going on to take us so long and cost us so much to do thing in the u. S. . Those are the three big things. There are a thousand different positive and negative things but in the broad scheme of things, when you are looking back and saying, how my going to triage this going out . Those of the things we are spending time trying to figure out with private sector partners. Thank you, mayor. Good answer. I grew up in new york about an hour and 10 minutes north of syracuse. I have been on the elevated highway that goes through syracuse and is an interchange for those who have not been on it. I have been underneath it and it is not fun to be underneath. What effects do we expect or are you seeing . President eisenhower, height of the cold war, the idea was partly defense to create a system of highways for moving military vehicles fast around the United States<\/a> which we did not have prior. I think that was because it was eisenhowers vision. We did a quick and shallow. We did not build as deep as the german audubon but we cut through cities and we routed a lot of interstate highways in ways we would not do today. What effects are you seeing or do you expect to see the system is old. 1956 was a long time ago. What will he see in terms of fixing some of that if we were to rebuild the interstate highway today . Mayor landrieu one of the incredible things about our country is we are constantly reimagining ourselves. Constantly adapting to new challenges and opportunities. We always have a chance to course correct which is a process of constant and total renewal. I dont want to condemn the entire system. I am not condemning it either. [laughter] mayor landrieu no. It was built fast and in some large measure, it was necessary. I think looking back all of us can agree that we ran through some neighborhoods we should not have run through. We never really thought much about what the consequence was going to be of that design as we played out. Now that many of them are come in they have to be replaced or repaired, some people are thinking about, why dont we think about reconnecting neighborhoods that have gotten separated. Africanamerican neighborhoods and indigenous neighborhoods or poor hispanic neighborhoods, some he sliced them in half. The big consequence was there is a wall. Everybody knows this. If you are in the south, and im sure this is true in the north although you blame the south for everything. [laughter] you can notice that chip on my shoulder. Do you want to go there . [laughter] mayor landrieu if you slice a neighborhood in half and you put a wall up, the folks that used to live and be neighbors never see each other anymore. You is this the right the culture and it changes it and pushes it into a whole new way. There is about 4 billion in this bill, 1 billion in the infrastructure law and another in the Inflation Reduction Act<\/a>, whose purpose is to ask cities and states to think about redesigning many of those neighborhoods that have been dissected and put them back together to grow the economy from the ground up. Ithaca is one of them. I toured one in denver the other day on i 70. Your mind goes, they cannot really do that. It would mess everybody up and nobody can get it done on time. We have a lot of smart architects and engineers and folks that can do this in a beautiful way. This project on i70 is incredible. Old hispanic neighborhood was separated by a massive highway. It completely destroyed the community. They have taken a quartermile of it and dug a tunnel underneath it. They flatten the surface where the cars used to go and turned into an amphitheater, park, soccer field and literally reconnected the school where the kids play through the yard with all the small businesses. It increase to private Sector Investment<\/a> twofold. As the mayor of a city i can tell you how you design the city is going to dictate how people move. Function follows design and it is absolutely possible in this country to build something beautiful that lifts people up that functions well. But from a National Security<\/a> perspective what will take care of the concerns when they built the interstates we will get smarter and better at it and figure out how to make the country more united based on the way we design infrastructure across the country. Thank you. One of the things i observed in my capacity is there is what i call a quiet technological revolution going on in infrastructure delivery. It does not get the headlines of facebook or google or these big companies, but there is new materials, new designs. It is not like 1956. There is a construction site that is highly automated. But there is all these technologies proving patented that will improve the performance of the infrastructure. They kind of need to be wrapped into the proposal, into the delivery of the infrastructure. Are you seeing those technologies adopted in the project you are touring around the country . Mayor landrieu the answer is yes. When i say we have to get better at this, once you have this amount of money flowing down, this opportunity that people have to actually hone their craft and there is pressure on them to do it differently. To build with resilience in mind. I have told you im from new orleans. When the bridges crashed, we did not build the bridge again. We built it high with different material. We built it in a way of resilience. This is in everybodys mind. The idea of cybersecurity in everybodys mind. The idea of climate is in everybodys mind. It is testing all the young folks graduating in architecture and engineering and product many factoring. All those people have been given license to think outside the box and come up with new materials, and new kinds of asphalt, all of those things happening exponentially when it never used to happen before because of the plethora of work getting done. I left a meeting at the white house where we brought together all of the Major Companies<\/a> and said, when you are thinking about Manufacturing Products<\/a> that are going to be Component Parts<\/a> going into ev stations, we need to think about this from a National Security<\/a> perspective. How we build in the technology to beat cybersecurity threats. That intense designing and communication is taking place because we know we are in a challenging environment. The same is true of her building electric grid. It is not just building it back stronger but safer and that means different materials. There is this huge wave of innovation going on across the country in the public and private sector. This is great. I have to followup because i wrote a book many years ago on publicprivate partnership. But they extend to other types of infrastructure and i think part of the Infrastructure Investment<\/a> in jobs act includes an increase on the cap. There are other things in the act. I tell my class the United States<\/a> is behind other countries in innovating partnerships between the public and private sector. Many other countries for decades have done partnerships much more than we have. I was pleased to see those aspects of the bill. Are you seeing that in your tour of sites and the proposals you are getting from state and local owners about more privatepublic cooperation . Mayor landrieu first of all, there is always tension in the Public Sector<\/a> about how much the private sector is going to come in and control or takeover, especially when it deals with employees, rights. This president is the most pro Union President<\/a> we have had and he is really intent on making sure, in the hiring process, Public Employees<\/a> are always taking care of. However, in my time as mayor in my observation there is almost nothing we do that is not a publicprivate partnership. It is not possible. When you are building a road and the mayors and governors are doing 90 of this well, they are overseeing the implementation but it is the private sector that is building this stuff. It is the private sector providing the materials. Take something as civil is picking up the garbage. Almost in every city and state the city lets the contracts but it is the private sector partner that does the work. That is going to continue in every way. In terms of specific concessions , those models will continue to change over time. You will always have tension over treating your employees well. If you have a sewer and water system and the private sector wants to come into that and you create a privatepublic partnership, their 50 ways to do that with selling it, making it a concession, or creating an environment where there is public oversight and the folks that get the concession run it with public oversight. You will find a different political pace depending on where you go in the country. All of those models will continue in my guess is if we are smart, and i think we are, we ought to find new ways to do better things. It is not onesizefitsall. What happens in north dakota will be different from new york and we want enough latitude where we instill the president s values but also give people the flexibility to get the job done. I think unions should be big supporters of p3s. Another shift in gears. One question. Mayor landrieu one question. [laughter] i have studied electric utilities, Postal Services<\/a> and so forth. There is always tension between the urban and rural populations. A lot of the megaprojects over the populations are, large concentration of people. But we dont want to leave out any groups. How do you view the bill as dealing with ensuring the spending and Infrastructure Investment<\/a> serves rural populations as well as urban areas . Mayor landrieu glad you asked. The megaprojects have not been awarded yet. I stand corrected. [laughter] mayor landrieu you could turn out to be right. The president has been explicit about this. The 14. 6 billion is just for Rural America<\/a>. We have a website, rural. Gov, to see anything in the bill. One in five americans live in rural areas. If you are from a city like new orleans, we cannot survive without the rural parishes providing everything, the great food, the music, the seafood. There is a symbiotic relationship between rural and urban america that people gloss over because of the politics of who we vote for. But in delivering goods to the american public, one cannot survive without the other. The president understands this. He instructed us to spend time on getting into Rural America<\/a>. The secretary of agriculture is the leader on this with the secretary of interior. We have made numerous trips to make sure there is high Speed Internet<\/a> everywhere in the country. You cannot have telemedicine or precision agriculture without making sure Rural America<\/a> is keyed in. On the roads and bridges project we are redoing 15,000 of these. They are designed to get into Rural America<\/a> and make sure combines if youre from louisiana the bayou. The private Sector Investment<\/a>, particularly from the automotive sector, are putting most of their plants in what people would call red states. That is how we define everything in washington which is not how people define it on the ground. My guess is when this is said and done a fairly significant amount of investments and benefit will be in rural and urban because our intent is to function as its design. We want America United<\/a> rather than divided. Out of respect for your schedule we will end. Mayor landrieu i have got","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"archive.org","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","width":"800","height":"600","url":"\/\/ia801501.us.archive.org\/13\/items\/CSPAN_20221029_191000_White_House_Adviser_Mitch_Landrieu_on_Infrastructure\/CSPAN_20221029_191000_White_House_Adviser_Mitch_Landrieu_on_Infrastructure.thumbs\/CSPAN_20221029_191000_White_House_Adviser_Mitch_Landrieu_on_Infrastructure_000001.jpg"}},"autauthor":{"@type":"Organization"},"author":{"sameAs":"archive.org","name":"archive.org"}}],"coverageEndTime":"20240619T12:35:10+00:00"}