The ASCE Report Card: Why isn’t anyone listening?

It must be frustrating to be a doctor. People come to you with all kinds of life threatening health problems that can be solved with simple changes to their lifestyle. The doctors give them great advice.  The people pay for this advice. And then they ignore it.

I was thinking about this as I reviewed the ASCE Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.

Well meaning, dedicated infrastructure professionals assemble data and assign scores to key components of the nation’s infrastructure. The grades are terrible. The potential outcomes are dire. Yet, the implications go largely ignored. Why?

I submit that there are a number of factors driving our collective indifference to the fact that our world is crumbling around us: 

1. The general public doesn’t trust.The Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership compiles an index of our confidence in leaders. Trust in state and local government leaders has steadily declined over the six years of compiled results. If the only time the public hears from you, or about you, is when something goes terribly wrong, or you are asking for trillions of dollars to fix something, expect to have a hard time earning trust.
    
2. I don’t see evidence of the crisis you describe.If I set aside my inside knowledge and step into the role of John Q. Public, I would see that my tap provided water this morning, my toilet flushed, the roads and bridges got me to work… I don’t see the crisis. Because I don’t trust you and there doesn’t seem to be a real crisis, why should I do anything about your bad report card?
    
3. This doesn’t seem like the top priority.There seems to be a whole lot of other concerns in the country that are of higher priority than your bad grades. We have issues with national defense, health care, unemployment, poverty, and education that seem to be more important. Plus, it doesn’t seem like you have a great plan for how to handle the money better if I, the citizen, give it to you. The citizen perception of public works is not exactly high. The only time he or she hears about public works is when someone made a mistake and a bridge fell down.

So how can we work to change the public’s perception of public works in general? How can we articulate the gravity of the situation and develop enough trust that action will be demanded?

Don’t think for a moment that things will eventually right themselves by just doing what we have always done.

There are a number of things we can do, but I think the number one key is communication. You can only build trust through open and honest communication. We cannot expect that a report card every couple of years is enough communication to build the trust needed to cause action. This communication has to start at the local level. Unfortunately, there tends to be a shortage of concrete data that would drive this communication. There is also a lack of well implemented citizen to government tools out there.

Citizens want transparency and accountability. Only when they have this are they likely to begin to trust our message about the infrastructure.

In the Harvard study, doctors are among the most trusted professionals and people still feel free to ignore their advice. Local government has rated below average in every year the survey has been performed.

If we don’t change this equation we cannot expect people react to the report card when it comes out.