Time its turn at the podium. Im chris edwards. Editor of cato. Thanks for all you folks coming today. Infrastructure is certainly a priority issue for the new administration. President trump has repeatedly called for a trillion dollars infrastructure plan. We dont know exactly what that means. Does he mean a trillion dollars in new federal Government Spending or does he mean the plan put together by his advisors wilbur ross that called for a tax credit for new investment in infrastructure . Im not a fan of either of those approaches, so im hoping that the white house is open to different ideas on infrastructure reform such as the ideas that are panelists are going to be talking about today. Everyone agrees that America Needs to improve the efficiency of its infrastructure investment, trump has talked about deregulation as one way to reduce the cost of infrastructure. Hes talked about for example, reducing the cost of highway building so we would get more and better highways and so i think thats very positive. The main reform that other nations have pursued to upgrade their infrastructure in recent years is prioritization and Public Private partnerships. For example, its been three decades now since Margaret Thatcher privatized Heathrow Airport in britain which launched a global sort of revolution in reforming airport management. Half of your europes airports are now private. Donald trump has called u. S. Airports which are owned by the government in all of the 50 states, hes called them third world. So whats donald trump going to do about that . We will see, but i hope he looks at some of these International Reform trends and adopts some of these thatcher style reforms here in the United States for our infrastructure. Our panel today will discuss what trump may do and should do on infrastructure reforms. We have experts here on highways, on Public Transit and on aviation. In my own writing on infrastructure, i borrowed heavily from all of these speakers today. I would encourage you to go to the websites of the institutions represented today to learn more about infrastructure. So ill introduce our four speakers and then we will get going. Our first speaker is ron ott who is a Research Fellow at the American Public policy institute. Ron was at Heritage Foundation and he was the go to guy for promarket reforms on infrastructure. When i write about transportation issues i always go back and look and see what ron has said over the years to make sure im sort of on the right track. Back in the reagan administration, ron was the associate director for privatization from 1987 to 1989. Ron has a ph. D. From indiana university. Our next speaker will be mark scribner. Hes a senior fellow at the competitive enterprise institute. He writes about infrastructure development, transportation safety, privatization and innovations such as Automated Vehicles and unmanned air crafts. Marks writings on air Traffic 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 undergrad degree from gwu. Our third speaker will be baruk figureen baum. Previously he was on capitol hill. He handled transportation issues. He earned a masters degree in city and Regional Planning not Georgia Institute of technology. In our cleanup speaker will be cattos randall otoole. Hes written tons and tons of books and studies on those topics over the years. Randalls explored how federal distort local transportation choices and his writings on urban transit really have been crucial to debunking a lot of the fairy tales you will see on light rail systems in city after city across the United States. Randalls been crucial in that debate. So i think each speaker is going to talk for ten minutes so we can hopefully have some time for q a. Thanks for coming. Thank you, chris for that kind introduction and also thank you for inviting me to be here today. This is an interesting time to talk about infrastructure. It was partway through the Electoral Campaign where Hillary Clinton announced that she was in favor of a half a trillion dollars Infrastructure Spending proposal that she believed would create great jobs and get the American Economy on the move again. A week later, candidate trump who thinks larger, bigger announced that hes in favor of a trillion dollars infrastructure plan. Since that date there hasnt been much detail provided on that and so were still kind of guessing but this also gives us a chance to maybe do some recommending because when you announce that you have a trillion dollars infrastructure plan, what you do, what you set off in america and globally for that matter is a huge money scramble and the money scramble has already started. The National Governors association has provided the white house with over 400 Shovel Ready Projects that are ready to go totaling about 120 million. Senator schumer has come out with the oppositions plan also for a trillion dollars, which as you would suspect is largely oriented toward his particular constituency and of course then theres Donald Trumps more and more of these things are coming through as everybody believes that theres going to be a huge amount of money on the table and they want to get it. But one of the important things that trump has let us know in 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, provide the financing, the management and presumably the operation of these things and this raises an important issue in infrastructure in america, because we really have two kinds of infrastructure. We have private infrastructure, when i say infrastructure, were simply typically talking about physical, long lived assets that provide society and people with the flow of useful services. We have housing, retail establishment, shopping centers, hotels, farms, not for profit hospitals, food service, commercial airlines, power generation, so on and so on. In Public Infrastructure we have generally roads, transit, airports, air Traffic Control, Passenger Rail, water supply, waste Water Treatment and so on. Now theres a difference between the first and second and its not just the ownership. Items listed in the first are not cited as a problem. In fact, if anything, you tend to overproduce that kind of infrastructure and many policies for example, agriculture policies are designed to curb food production. Its very difficult to build a new hospital without getting approval because there would otherwise be a glut of hospitals and if anything problem Housing Production is we tend to overproduce creating nasty cycles. In Public Infrastructure, however, these are where we have all the deficiencies where we have shortages and terrible conditions, pothole and bridges, Water Systems that dont work and the and this is where a lot of people talk about the infrastructure crisis. But the question is, really an infrastructure crisis or is it a crisis of socialism since all the things that are problematic that dont lend themselves to easy solutions are, in fact, publicly owned. And all the things in the private sector are not perceived as a problem. So its sort of like capitalism versus socialism in this and we need to make that distinction very clear as we look for the different sort of policies. Now the real question is since theres going to be this huge money scramble how are we going to make decisions about all these projects and, by the way, we have the other threat is that the republicans in the house are threatening and may very well likely in the middle of this year end their ban on earmarks. They came very close to doing it at the beginning of this session and they werent defeated. They simply put the issue off until later this year. With a thousand dollars on the table, i think theres going to be a free for all because Congress Wants to be part of the action as well. And so this is suggests that there is the real risk to waste this money. So my suggestion is you start to look at mechanisms that have already been created and implemented to rationalize the selection of infrastructure policies. An example of that is one that was just implemented in virginia in 2016 and is now been operating for two years to create a Performance Based system for selecting Infrastructure Projects. These are only in transportation and includes transit both transit and roads but Something Like this could easily be done for waste Water Treatments, airports and so on. Its the idea of coming up with an objective cost benefit standards to rank projects by their particular value. Now in 2014, virginia enacted whats called house bill 2, which is then actually implemented in 2016 for the first time. It covers the entire state, congestion is one of congestion mitigation is one of six factors thats considered in any project. All the measures or qualitative and it must predominate in major urbanized areas and the factors are waited by region. Now the program is now called smart scale and the six measures are safety, congestion mitigation, accessibility, environmental quality, Economic Development and land use coordination. And since all parts of the state are different in their problems, it is been the state has been divided up into four different regions where the waits are different. Now in category a which includes only three metropolitan areas in the state, hampton roads, washington, d. C. , virginia suburbs and fredricksburg which is part of Northern Virginia at this point and congestion mitigation counts for 45 of the score for different particular projects. So congestion must predominate and the other factors are relatively minor in comparison. Once you get into the smaller cities where there isnt much congestion, the other factors take over and when you get to category c and d which are largely rural, congestion counts for virtually nothing because they dont have a congestion problem. So the reason for this is to hold all regions harmless in terms of the money they get from the state because what happens is when you Start Talking about congestion mitigation to rural legislatures and officials, they say, oh, youre going to ship all the money to Northern Virginia. This allows everybody to tailer their state money to the particular needs in their community. Now, in each of the factors we have several subfacters. For example, in access bilts its access to jobs, which is the most critical part, access for the disadvantaged and modal choices which is a zap to the transit industry. Economic Development Section we have support for Economic Development, interer modal access which also relates to congestion mitigation. Now how the process works is that all the projects that are put forth are new projects or substantial revitalize projects that will cover the next six years and it includes transit. Metropolitan and local governments submit their particular projects to the v dot, v dot scores and measures the dollars the benefits per dollar according to the scale that applies to each region over the six different factors and then v dot selects the projects that are in the top in all these different regions and then they submit them to the commonwealth transportation board and then they, which is essentially a political board then goes through these recommendations and either accepts them or makes changes as appropriate. So weve done this now in virginia for 2016 and 2017 and of the 8. 5 billion worth of projects that were submitted to be scored, only 2. 7 billion were actually approved for 2016 and 2017. And theyve been announced so far and obviously those who were the losers, say, well this smart scale process really isnt any good. Its a flawed position. I think generally everybodys happy. The elected officials who voted for it are pleased and it seems to be working and most of the things that i could see make great deal of sense in terms of either keeping or getting rid of. Now whats important in closing is that these qualitative measures are only as valuable as what goes into them. In the case of virginia, it was congestion mitigation was the most important part because congestion is a very serious problem in two two major metropolitan areas of the country. But maryland, for example, which also has congestion but has a different political philosophy than we have just came up with their set of proposals and, in fact, not only are they proposals for guide lines but they are enacted into legislation. Its the legislation that says which means that the government cant change anything because if he does he violates the law. But these law. As you can imagine, with a liberal legislature in maryland, that the scale factors are largely proenvironment, protransit, probicycle, prowalking. As the governor pointed it, it is hard to approve high way projects. Its a problem because its enacted into law and he threatened to veto it. He sent it back and it came back with a veto safe majority. So, it is now the law. So, this is the case where setting up performance goals, if you are not careful could backfire on you. With that, let me conclude and look forward to questions later on. Thanks. Hi, everybody. Thank you, ron and thank you, chris, for moderating. We had this issue of trying to find 1 trillion worth of Infrastructure Projects over the next ten years. This is coming from both parties. What i want to talk about today is getting the most bang for the buck and shifting the costs and project risks away from the taxpayer. You have heard speaker ryan and leader mcconnell both say that trillion dollars will not be a trillion dollars of more spending. Getting the most bang for your buck are financing reform and Regulatory Reform. With respect to financing, this is important. Financing is where these entities, the Government Entities with a private sector partner enter the credit markets and use Debt Financing to construct the Infrastructure Projects. Contrast funding is coming out of the treasury. So, infrastructure financing and private public partnerships. Now, one problem for increasing private sector involvement in this sector is on the public side, they are able to access tax free Municipal Bonds. The private sector generally does not enjoy such a tax advantage. The ideal solution here would be to Level Financing and eliminate the Municipal Bond tax exemption, but that is politically unrealistic, at least at this point. So, the second best solution here is to expand tax free Debt Financing for Public Private partnerships and we already have private activity bonds that were in the 2005 highway reauthorization. What they do is allow the private sector to borrow in a way that is similar to the public sector. However, we have a lifetime cap of National Lifetime cap of 15 billion and as of january 23rd this year, according to the federal highway administration, 10. 86 billion has been allocated. For the administration and congress to greatly increase private sector financing, that cap is going to need to be raised, substantially. Theres a solution, lifting the cap, also potentially expanding asset Class Eligibility and the types of projects eligible. Right now, its limited to surface transportation projects. So, we already have an example. The Current Administration could look at the past administration, which had a proposal in 2018 to create qualified Public Infrastructure bonds or qpibs and it would be for airports, ports, water Waste Systems and eliminate the Expiration Date for the bonds. If the goal is increasing private sector involvement in the near term, a new qpib style bond framework should be created to level the financing between the private and public sectors. Another area, this would be Public Financing reform, but we have a forthcoming faa reauthorization bill and one thing we would like to see is modernizing whats known as the passenger facility charge, a local airport user charge and it helps to reduce the federal tax. Right now, we have the pfc butitis capped and unchanged since 2000 and inflation is half the buying power of the pfc. Many airports are approaching debt limits. If we modernize the pfc to eliminate the cap and allow the airports to raise the passenger facility charge, the pfc is used to back bonds, allowing the airports to reaccess the credit markets that they are soon to be shut out of, if they havent already been. Large hubs said for years they