Infrastructure is Finally a Reality Part 1: A Bill has Become a Law
And just like that, Washington begins to move again. On Monday, after months of negotiation, the House came together to pass the Senate passed infrastructure bill. In a large ceremony at the White House, this essential investment into the nation’s physical infrastructure. It represents $1 trillion in infrastructure spending. After lengthy bipartisan negotiations, the bill, which includes $550 billion in new federal spending and reauthorizes several existing programs, passed the Senate nearly three months ago. This is a significant win for the Biden agenda but let's look at why it might be good for our communities.
The White House fact sheet as a great breakdown of the deal but below are some key areas that I wanted to highlight for our communities:
Public Transit
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal has made the most significant investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak. The deal will invest $66 billion to provide healthy, sustainable transportation options for millions of Americans by modernizing and expanding transit and rail networks across the country. It will replace thousands of transit vehicles, including buses, with clean, zero-emission vehicles. And, it will benefit communities of color who are twice as likely to take public transportation and often lack good public transit options. In addition, it will help transit workers who are disproportionately workers of color.
Electric Vehicle Infrastructure
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will invest $7.5 billion to build out the first-ever national network of EV chargers in the United States. The deal will provide funding for the deployment of EV chargers along highway corridors to facilitate long-distance travel and within communities to provide convenient charging where people live, work, and shop – and funding will focus on rural, disadvantaged, and hard-to-reach communities.
Clean School Buses
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will deliver thousands of electric school buses nationwide, including in rural communities. The deal invests in zero- and low-emission school buses, in addition to more than $5 billion in funding for public transit agencies to adopt low- and no-emissions buses. In addition, they will help the more than 25 million children and thousands of bus drivers who breathe polluted air on their rides to and from school. Diesel air pollution is linked to asthma and other health problems that hurt our communities and cause students to miss school, particularly in communities of color and Tribal communities.
Resilience
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal is the most significant investment in the resilience of physical and natural systems in American history. Millions of Americans feel the effects of climate change each year when their roads wash out, airport power goes down, or schools get flooded. People of color are more likely to live in areas most vulnerable to flooding and other climate change-related weather events. The deal makes our communities safer and our infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of climate change and cyber-attacks, with an investment of over $50 billion to protect against droughts, heat, and floods – in addition to a significant investment in the weatherization of American homes.
Clean Drinking Water
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will expand access to clean drinking water to all American families, eliminate the nation’s lead service lines, and help to clean up the dangerous chemical PFAS. Currently, up to 10 million American households and 400,000 schools and child care centers lack access to safe drinking water. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will invest $55 billion to expand access to clean drinking water for households, businesses, schools, and child care centers all across the country. From rural towns to struggling cities, the deal will invest in water infrastructure and eliminate lead service pipes, including in Tribal Nations and disadvantaged communities that need it most.
Legacy Pollution
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal delivers the most significant investment in tackling legacy pollution in American history by cleaning up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaiming abandoned mines, and capping orphaned oil and gas wells. In thousands of rural and urban communities around the country, hundreds of thousands of former industrial and energy sites are now idle – sources of blight and pollution. Proximity to a Superfund site can lead to elevated levels of lead in children’s blood. Millions of Americans also live within a mile of the tens of thousands of abandoned mines and oil and gas wells – a comprehensive, continuing course of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is a significant cause of climate change. The bill will invest $21 billion to clean up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine land, and cap orphaned oil and gas wells. These projects will remediate environmental harms, address the legacy pollution that harms communities’ public health, create good-paying, union jobs, and advance long-overdue environmental justice. This investment will benefit communities of color like the 26% Black Americans and 29% Hispanic Americans who live within three miles of a Superfund site – a higher percentage than for Americans overall.
Clean Energy Transmission
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal’s more than $65 billion investment is the most significant investment in clean energy transmission and the electric grid in American history. It upgrades our power infrastructure, including by building thousands of miles of new, resilient transmission lines to facilitate the expansion of renewable energy. It creates a new Grid Deployment Authority, invests in research and development for advanced transmission and electricity distribution technologies, and promotes innovative grid technologies that deliver flexibility and resilience. It also invests in demonstration projects and research hubs for next-generation technologies like advanced nuclear reactors, carbon capture, and clean hydrogen.
To read more about the environmental impact of the bill, check out this great piece from Vox. How you could see cleaner air and water with Biden’s new infrastructure law
Now that the law is signed, the next phase of work begins in earnest. The government will start creating funding streams and paths for money to flow to communities. The President has assigned Mitch Landrieu, the former Mayor of New Orleans who has extensive experience in government contracts from Katrina, to oversee the law's implementation. For our communities, this means that they'll be a slew of planning meetings that will help shape how the money gets spent at the local level and what kind of projects get authorized. Folks should play a particular note to the sections that are supposed to impact people of color significantly. These are places where they will explicitly have to seek out people of color for their opinions before a project hits the ground, which means the critical area to weigh in and get your community's voice heard. In the next few months, there pay attention to notices on public hearings and meetings around infrastructure projects.
Get ready, people it’s going to get things that you’re people need, and you should pack hearings to make sure it happens.