Good News on the Infrastructure Front: Executive Council on Infrastructure Formed to Redress Funding Gap-- Clean Water Council
by Clean Water Council
In a positive development for water infrastructure funding, a new Executive Council on Infrastructure was recently formed with the purpose of formulating recommendations to help facilitate more private sector investment in U.S. infrastructure. The Council, part of the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center, is composed of corporate CEOs and other executives drawn from the financial, industrial, logistics and services industries. The Council’s goal is to connect private capital to American infrastructure and to free up billions of dollars that could be available to finance infrastructure improvements. The Council will explore ways to fill in gaps in the private sector’s knowledge of infrastructure that currently discourage private investment. It will also examine the legislative and regulatory barriers to private funding and the various financial vehicles that could be used to attract more of that funding.
The Council plans to issue a set of specific recommendations for accomplishing this mission in a report scheduled for 2016.
Council founders have noted that despite bipartisan efforts in Congress and state legislatures, the reality is that government alone can’t fund all the critical infrastructure that our country needs now and in future decades. They point out the growing deficit in what the U.S. spends on infrastructure versus that of countries with which we compete, citing a U.S. Treasury Department statistic showing that our government’s investment in infrastructure as a percentage of economic output has fallen by 50 percent in the last 50 years.
The Council recognizes the enormous potential of private capital to help