These are excerpts from a roundtable discussion sponsored by Real Estate Media and LePatner & Associates. The full text will appear in the July-August issue of Real Estate New York magazine.
NEW YORK CITY-The region's growth is threatened by long-term inattention to the state of its infrastructure, a problem that's even more severe on the state and national levels, according to a panel discussion Wednesday during the BuildingsNY conference at the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center here. Expanding the capacity of the nation's infrastructure—ranging from highways and mass transit to utilities—while keeping it in a state of good repair will require private and public expenditures in the trillions of dollars, panelists said.
"We ignore our nation's infrastructure at our peril," said moderator Barry LePatner, founder of LePatner & Associates, which specializes in construction law. He noted that last summer's deadly bridge collapse along Interstate 35 in Minneapolis was certain to be repeated elsewhere. "It's a question of when."
LePatner added, however, that the I-35 span was not even among the thousands of US bridges listed as either hazardous or functionally obsolete. "That should scare the dickens out of everyone."
Panelist Sam Schwartz, principal of Sam Schwartz Engineering and leader of a forensics team studying the Minneapolis disaster, recalled that as New York City's traffic commissioner in the 1980s, he nearly had to permanently close the Williamsburg and 59th Street bridges. Upkeep on both heavily traveled spans had been neglected for years, Schwartz said.
"By being penny-wise, we're saddling future generations with enormous costs," Schwartz said, adding that committing funds to maintaining a state of good repair could reduce the need for expensive remedial action. "If you invest in children early, you don't have to invest in jails later."
Lou Venech, GM of regional transportation policy development at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said it's "important to see the whole picture" and not just high-profile capital projects. In common with other panelists, he called upon the business community to advocate for sustainable sources of infrastructure funding. "The politicians have to wake up to allocating money in the budget for maintenance," LePatner said.
Although the Bloomberg administration's efforts to enact congestion pricing were unsuccessful, they did represent a "creative" approach to sources of funding, said Mike Meola, SVP of strategic planning for the Hudson Yards project at the New York City Economic Development Corp. Meola said a more successful example of creative thinking—issuing bonds to finance the extension of the No. 7 subway line to the Far West Side—has yielded tangible results: construction cranes associated with the 7 project are visible from outside the Javits Center. "The subway is under construction and will open in 2013."
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Paul Bubny
Paul Bubny is managing editor of Real Estate Forum and GlobeSt.com. He has been reporting on business since 1988 and on commercial real estate since 2007. He is based at ALM Real Estate Media Group's offices in New York City.
