America's Infrastructure Report Card

My home state of Maryland opened its fifth casino last week.

That in itself is indicative of the budget woes being faced by most states.

I don’t mind gambling as a fiscal solution. If people want to drop money on games that inherently favor the house, that’s fine with me. That’s what liberty is.

But this casino opening highlighted some other problems that our states are facing.

The day it opened, people sat in traffic for hours just to go a few miles…

Local news choppers showed lines of cars with glowing brake lights. On-location clips showed non-gambling residents complaining about the new congestion.

On the first night, the casino reached capacity of 10,000.

Marylanders were ready to hit the blackjack tables, but the road infrastructure made it a bust.

Check out this Tweet sent by the Maryland State Highway Administration:

That’s right! Unless you’re coming out to gamble, please stay off the roads your tax dollars keep paved.

Don’t make sure the roads can handle the increased traffic volume before you attach a 330,000 square foot casino on an already behemoth shopping mall. That would make too much sense.

But that’s the state of infrastructure in the U.S. today.

We’re playing catch-up with roads, bridges, water treatment, Internet access, and more…

And we’re quickly falling behind.

Fail

Every few years the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issues a report card on public facilities. The grades are the same as your school days: A is the best, F is the worst.

We’ve had a failing grade of D in every report card since 1988.

Ironically, the 1998 report awarded school infrastructure an F; mass transit was the valedictorian with a solid C.

The most recent report card issued in 2009 gave U.S. infrastructure an overall grade of D — and estimated that $2.2 trillion needed to be spent to bring it up to speed.

Here’s what it looks like:

Their new report will be released next year, and ASCE President Greg DiLoreto says to expect more of the same:

We haven’t really invested additional money, so I would be hard-pressed to believe that the grade would improve. Not everything is falling apart — you can find examples of agencies spending money. But the D represents an overall condition of America’s infrastructure.

As civil engineers, we feel we are stewards of the infrastructure. It’s what we know best. It’s just like a doctor telling you that you have a heart condition. We’re taking it to the concrete and saying ‘America, you have a mortar and bricks problem with your infrastructure.’

But how do you pony up trillions for infrastructure in a time of record deficits and tightened credit?

Private Players

In a recent Bloomberg Brief, eight infrastructure and municipal bonds analysts discussed the problem.

I want to share two of the most insightful comments that came from that talk.

First, from municipal credit researcher Eric Friedland:

The issue is that in the future, because there’s a lot of deferred maintenance and deferred spending going on by kicking the can down the road, there’s a potential problem. This report may be extreme in saying infrastructure today is failing, but the more important thing is highlighting that if spending doesn’t increase, you’re going to have some more serious problems going forward.

Municipal research analyst Philip Villaluz put a finer point on it:

I don’t believe it’s a big secret that U.S. infrastructure is in sore need of repair, maintenance and rehabilitation. The problem isn’t deciding whether repairs need to be done, but rather how to pay for it all.

One look at the balance sheets of local, state, and federal government, and it’s easy to see the money isn’t coming from there (the reasons why are an entirely different article — or book)…

I think what we’re going to see is a lot of assets and projects being taken over by private companies.

In fact, this is already happening.

Thanks to a backroom decision by G20 members, $50 trillion in infrastructure spending is about to be unleashed. And a select few global companies are going to get the brunt of the contracts.

We obtained a copy of the confidential report detailing the plan.

Keep in mind it’s not going to play out overnight… a sum like that will take years to spend.

Play it right and you can ride those years of infrastructure investment to easy market gains.

Call it like you see it,

Nick Hodge

@nickchodge on Twitter

Nick is the founder and president of the Outsider Club, and the investment director of the thousands-strong stock advisories, Early Advantage and Wall Street’s Underground Profits. He also heads Nick’s Notebook, a private placement and alert service that has raised tens of millions of dollars of investment capital for resource, energy, cannabis, and medical technology companies. Co-author of two best-selling investment books, including Energy Investing for Dummies, his insights have been shared on news programs and in magazines and newspapers around the world. For more on Nick, take a look at his editor’s page.

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