U.S. Senate passes 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill, what could this mean?

The U.S. Senate passed a 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure package that will have a big impact in Arizona, with funding for everything from roads and bridges to water systems and electric grids. We talked about the infrastructure plan with Dale Rogers, a supply-chain management professor at ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business.

The U.S. has not put much money into improving infrastructure for several years now, “the last 30 years really since President Reagan took office, we really starved our infrastructure,” Rogers said.

As more people started to move and settle into the Southwest, there is a lot of growth, “in Phoenix specifically, you know, we really became of age, in an era where we’ve been starved, from an infrastructure standpoint so it’s really badly needed here,” Rogers said.

He continued to break down money that could be utilized for Arizona’s airports specifically, “we should mention 360 million for airports. Here in Arizona, 216 million alone into Sky Harbor. Sky Harbor really is the big gorilla in the room…And, you know it’s an international airport. And the terminals needs some fixing up. We need more runways, we need more gates, it’s really an airport, that was built for about 1965/1970 and it’s 2021.”

A main thing about this is, “infrastructure doesn’t vote, so it’s very easy for politicians on both sides of the aisle. This isn’t a Republican or Democrat thing. This is both sides, the infrastructure doesn’t vote. And, so it’s easy to not take care of it. And so since about 1980, we’ve really been starving and kicking that can down the road,” Rogers said.

Rogers believes it’s important to get this bill passed in the house and give care to infrastructure, “hopefully it gets through the house, which I don’t know if it will but it’s really badly needed, and if it doesn’t happen this time around we really needed that.”