No one campaigns against infrastructure.

No one really campaigns on it, either.

In battleground Ohio, a state getting more attention than most this election season, President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney fill their stump speeches with talk of cars or coal or trade with China. They say little, if anything, about the roads those cars travel, the bridges that coal crosses and the ports through which those goods pass.

While the nation’s crumbling urban core might not be a bumper-sticker issue in the race for the White House, any big-city mayor or planner will tell you that aging infrastructure poses a long-term economic threat to metropolitan areas.

In the industrial Midwest that is key to electoral victory, the threat is pronounced in places like Cleveland.

Here, fears about the Inner Belt Bridge have moved Ohio Gov. John Kasich to seek a private-sector partner to expedite replacement of a rusting Interstate 90 span that plugs into the heart of downtown. The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority is asking voters this fall for a tax increase to shore up the Cuyahoga River and make other improvements.

Bringing the nation’s roads, bridges and waterways up to date would cost more than $2 trillion, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. And the U.S. Conference of Mayors has argued that federal infrastructure dollars be reserved for projects in the metro areas, not for what its members characterize as low-priority bridges to nowhere.

The Plain Dealer, in separate interviews last week with Obama and Romney, asked each how he would address the infrastructure gap as president, specifically with regard to the urban centers that serve as a region’s economic anchor.

Both recognize the problem. But they differ in their plans to address it.

A year ago at this time, infrastructure seemed poised to become a significant part of Obama’s re-election campaign. He emphasized the need for more investment in road and bridge repairs in his stalled American Jobs Act and by traveling in September 2011 to the Brent Spence Bridge, which spans the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington, Ky.

Though the topic remains on Obama’s radar, it’s not the centerpiece of his argument for a second term. Even so, he broached the subject when meeting with The Plain Dealer’s editorial board before his Wednesday campaign rally at Kent State University. When talking about partisan gridlock, he noted several issues that should be ripe for compromise.

“Transportation is another good example,” he said. “Historically that’s never been a Democratic or Republican issue. Members of Congress like to build things and show up and cut ribbons. We’ve got a whole bunch of deferred maintenance right now, and the construction industry is still weak despite the fact the we’re starting to see housing tick up.”

Asked specifically how his administration would prioritize such projects, city versus suburban, Obama replied: “I think that increasingly not only experts, but also voters, recognize the old urban-suburban-exurban divide doesn’t really make sense anymore. When you look at states here in the Midwest, cities are the economic engines for the suburbs.”

Obama favors an infrastructure bank, which would back private investment in transportation projects with public money. Projects would be selected based on how they would boost a region or state. But attempts to create the bank have stalled in Congress, and Obama acknowledged last week that “we haven’t gotten it instituted as robustly as we would like.”

The president said parochial politics work against his merit-based approach.

“There’s always going to be some dividing up the pie,” Obama said. “That’s the nature of Congress. A member is going to want something in their district, and somebody who’s on a committee is going to see if they can leverage a little bit more for themselves than somebody who’s not on a committee. That’s the way Congress works.”

Romney, interviewed earlier the same day, said his infrastructure priorities would extend beyond urban centers.

“Our infrastructure’s crumbling,” Romney said aboard his campaign bus after an event near Columbus. “It was built in the 1950s and 1960s, it had an estimated 50-year life, and you’re seeing a dramatic need to repair what we have and to expand our system to remove the choke points that are making it more difficult for our goods to travel across the nation.”

The former Massachusetts governor was noncommittal last year when CNBC’s Larry Kudlow asked him about Obama’s proposed infrastructure bank. Prompted by Kudlow, who said the concept “sounds like Fannie Mae,” Romney replied that he didn’t “want the government getting into more and more enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

Both are government-sponsored companies that guarantee home loans.

On Wednesday, Romney said he favors public-private partnerships to fund transportation projects. Such arrangements, he said, allow entities to work together “to expand our infrastructure and then devote a stream of revenue to repay the public-private partnership.” The approach is comparable to how Kasich is completing the Inner Belt Bridge replacement.

The governor, like Romney a Republican, has instructed the Ohio Department of Transportation to recruit a private-sector engineering, construction and finance team to pay for the estimated $332 million project up front. The state would then pay the design-build-finance team with principal and interest. Kasich says it will be a first-of-its-kind deal for Ohio.

Plain Dealer Washington Bureau Chief Stephen Koff contributed to this story.

By Henry J. Gomez, The Plain Dealer
(Cleveland.com)
Published: Saturday, September 29, 2012, 6:00 PM
Updated: Saturday, September 29, 2012, 7:16 PM

KDOT: Expiration of aid bill, use of fuel-efficient cars could impede road improvements.

The two largest components of Kansas highway funding have been based on federal aid and the state’s motor fuel tax. But with those resources expected to decline, the Kansas Department of Transportation has been surveying local government and community leaders around the state about what they think the state should do to maintain funding for highway improvements.
KDOT put the question to government and community leaders at regional “local consult” meetings in Salina, Hays, Dodge City and Hutchinson last week.

At each of the meetings, KDOT has passed out a survey listing nine specific short- or long-term solutions and asking for other suggestions.

The top three picks at each of the four meetings thus far, including Hutchinson, have been the same – increase the motor fuels tax; levy a tax on alternative fuels such as methanol, compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, hydrogen, electricity and biodiesel; and an extra annual registration fee for cars that run on alternative fuels or electricity, said Lindsey Douglas, KDOT’s chief of governmental affairs.

Four more local consult meetings are coming up in Olathe, Topeka, Chanute and Wichita. After the last meeting on Oct. 11, KDOT plans to analyze the results and present the findings and other research to the Legislature in January.

The last long-term federal highway funding law expired in 2009. Since then, Congress has passed 10 short-term extensions. The latest, passed in late June, extends highway funding into Fiscal Year 2014. However, Douglas said that unless Congress comes up with a solution, federal highway aid to states could drop from about $40 billion to $4.2 billion in 2014.

State and federal fuel tax revenues also are being affected by improving fuel economy, Douglas said. The better mileage your car gets per gallon, the less fuel you buy and the less fuel tax you pay. Federal rules mandate that new cars average 34.1 miles per gallon by 2016 and 54.5 mpg by 2025.

“That’s good for people, but bad for infrastructure investment,” Douglas said.

Alternative fuels also are having an impact. Electric cars don’t burn gas, so their owners don’t pay fuel tax, but their cars have the same impact on highway maintenance as gas-burning cars, she said.

Of the top choices identified during the local consult meetings, the simplest and most popular was an increase in the current motor fuel tax. Douglas said a 1-cent increase in the tax would raise about $18 million more per year. A 5-cent increase would raise an extra $88 million a year.

Other options presented included a dedicated sales tax on auto sales, an increase in vehicle registration fees, linking future fuel tax rates to the Consumer Price Index or some other index, local option taxes such as a city or count sales or property tax to pay for local road projects, toll roads, and a tax on the number of vehicle miles driven.

At the Hutchinson meeting, opinion was divided on the fourth and fifth options for short- and long-term solutions. A dedicated sales tax on auto sales was the No. 4 short-term solution, followed by indexed fuel taxes. For the long-term, the Hutchinson group had a tax based on vehicle miles traveled at No. 4 and indexed fuel taxes at No. 5.

By Ken Stephens –
The Hutchinson News – [email protected]
Published: 9/30/2012 8:32 PM | Last update: 9/30/2012 10:44 PM

No one can replace Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, our favorite moderate Midwestern Republican who has passionately told us not to text and drive and also made sure Congress caught hell when the Federal Aviation Administration was facing a partial shutdown. However, unless President Obama has convinced LaHood otherwise, he plans to step down from his post at the end of the president’s current term. (In his typical straight-talk manner, he casually mentioned his plans to a Chicago reporter last year, causing an unintended news-cycle firestorm.)

Obama will need a replacement, so it’s time to play the parlor game of who the next head of DOT will be: If Obama wins, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been mentioned as a candidate. There is also former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. How about former House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar, D-Minn? What about another moderate Republican in Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio?

If Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney wins, LaTourette could also be on the list. (Hey, why not?) What about retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas? One college blogger from NextGen Journal thinks LaHood could be a possibility for Romney. He’s a Republican after all. That’s doubtful, however, considering the disdain LaHood has shown for Republicans in Congress.

For you experts, I have some more substantive questions: What are the biggest challenges for the next Transportation Secretary? What qualities would get that person to advance the ball on infrastructure? Where should LaHood’s replacement have expertise? In business? In surface transportation? In aviation? In Congress? And while we’re at it, why don’t all of you throw any names into the hat that I haven’t thought of.

By Fawn Johnson
Correspondent, National Journal
(National Journal)
October 1, 2012 | 8:30 a.m.

Would a private company agree to build new express lanes along the traffic-choked Parkway East in exchange for the right to collect tolls from the drivers who use them?

State Rep. Rick Geist, outgoing chair of the House Transportation Committee, was unequivocal: “I know it’s going to happen.”

Mr. Geist, Gov. Tom Corbett and other officials gathered in New Kensington on Wednesday for a ceremonial signing of House Bill 3, which authorizes public-private partnerships to improve transportation facilities. The governor actually signed the bill into law in July.

Those in attendance said the law will stimulate private investment in public highways, bridges and other facilities, advancing projects that governments can’t afford on their own.

“We really don’t know exactly where an increase in public-private partnerships will lead, but we know that status quo hasn’t been working,” Mr. Corbett said. “Pennsylvania annually comes up short in the amount of money needed for our transportation system. The old models for funding transportation, notably the motor fuels tax, have not delivered everything we needed.”

A state advisory commission in 2010 estimated that state spending was $3.5 billion per year below the level needed to bring transportation infrastructure to good repair.

With Pennsylvania leading the nation in deficient bridges and seeing its overall road quality deteriorate, there is little money to build new highway capacity.

Mr. Geist said he already has been approached by engineering companies that have concepts for new lanes on the parkway, including stacking them on overpasses or opening the Squirrel Hill Tunnels to the sky.

“I think you’re going to see some amazing things happen. I would think the Parkway East was one of the early candidates (for a partnership),” he said.

State Transportation Secretary Barry Schoch said he thinks someone will propose a public-private partnership to add lanes on the parkway because of the heavy traffic volume and potential to generate toll revenue. The question, he said, is how much public subsidy the private developer would demand.

“Right now, every dollar I have is programmed to bare-bones maintenance,” he said.

Several officials pointed to the $1.3 billion expansion of the Capital Beltway in Virginia as an example of the potential of public-private partnerships. A private company, using some public financing, is adding two E-ZPass express lanes in both directions for 14 miles, a mammoth undertaking that included replacing more than 50 bridges and modifying 12 interchanges.

Drivers who don’t want to sit in the beltway’s traffic jams will be able to move to the express lanes and pay tolls that vary based on traffic volume — higher prices during peak periods to keep the express lanes flowing.

Mr. Geist said other regional possibilities for partnerships that have been pitched to him include a private bridge improving access between the Pitcairn Railroad Yards and the Pennsylvania Turnpike and reconstruction of deteriorated locks and dams on the Allegheny River.

He also has been approached about a combined rail-coal-shale gas project but said he could not provide details because he signed a confidentiality agreement.

“There are a lot of people out there right now collectively putting their heads together, and the money pools that are available for investment in Pennsylvania are huge,” he said.

Under the law, private investors can pitch their ideas to a new seven-member Public Private Transportation Partnership Board, chaired by Mr. Schoch and made up of other gubernatorial and legislative appointees.

“On the other hand, if the state comes up with an idea where private-sector operation makes more sense, we can ask for proposals (from private interests),” Mr. Corbett said.

Mr. Corbett said 33 other states have laws authorizing the partnerships, called P3s.

“Some legislation requires imagination, not just when we write it, but after it is enacted,” he said. “House Bill 3 is that kind of law.”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By Jon Schmitz
September 27, 2012 1:15 am

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Nine managers in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County Government have retired in their 50’s to take a six-figure annual pension which will cost taxpayers as much as $3.7 million each.

A taxpayer advocacy group, Taxpayers United of America, obtained the names and figures under an open records request and released names and dollar amounts to call attention to what it says is an overextended system that cannot sustain itself.

“The system needs reform,” said Rae Ann McNeilly, Director of Outreach for the Chicago-based group. “It’s a matter of mathematics. We cannot pay people not to work for longer than they were paid to work.”

Among the public employees expected to cost taxpayers the most:

• Jim Schumacher, who retired as Deputy City Manager in Charlotte at age 57, earns $114,367 a year from his pension and is projected to get a lifetime payout of $3.75 million.

• Greg Clemmer, who retired as Deputy Superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, at age 56 earns $117,401 a year from his pension and is projected to get a lifetime payout of $3.7 million.

• Jim Pendergraph, who retired as Mecklenburg County Sheriff at age 57, earns $101,314 a year from his county pension and is projected to get a lifetime payout of more than $3 million.

Taxpayers United is encouraging lawmakers to raise mandatory retirement ages for incoming public employees and to shift retirement systems from open-ended pensions to 401(k) programs that limit taxpayer exposure as employees live longer.

But the group knows it has its work cut out for it as one out of every eight employees in North Carolina has a public sector job and represents a powerful voting block.

by STUART WATSON
NewsChannel 36 Staff
(WCNC.com)

An intriguing new trend is emerging in some communities: bicycle-friendly business districts (BFBDs). A handful of cities have created or are exploring the creation of BFBDs.

We’re fortunate to have perhaps the nation’s expert on BFBDs, April Economides, educate us about this trend. Economides created the nation’s first Bike-Friendly Business District program for the City of Long Beach and has launched similar efforts in San Diego and Oakville (Canada). She speaks around the U.S. and Canada about “The Business Case for Bicycling” and Bike-Friendly Business Districts. Her complete bio follows her story below.

In this first story, Economides explains the concept of BFBDs. In the next installment Economides will discuss the multitude of economic benefits BFBDs can bring to businesses and neighborhoods.
We hope you find this intriguing for your community.

Bicycle-Friendly Business Districts
Americans are starting to realize the strong connection between bicycling and shopping local. When we hop on a bike instead of in a car, we tend to stay closer to home and support small businesses. We also notice more businesses since we’re traveling at human-scale speed. In addition to supporting our local economy, bicycling tends to bring less stress, more joy, and increased health.

These are a few of the reasons behind the new development of bicycle-friendly business districts (BFBDs) – districts where merchants actively encourage people to bike to area shops and restaurants, and where merchants and employees ride, too. BFBDs integrate bikes into a district’s operations, events and promotions.
The City of Long Beach piloted four BFBDs in 2011, which included: bikes and cargo bikes for merchant deliveries, errands, and commutes; the integration of bicycling into existing events, including bike repair clinics, community rides, bike valets, and bike portraits; the creation of the nation’s largest citywide discount program for bicyclists (called “Bike Saturdays”); bike rack installations; ‘Walk Your Bike’ sidewalk stencils; a diversity of promotions, including print ads, media outreach, websites, e-blasts, social media, doorstep flyers, posters, videos, and cross-promotion; business and community education about the economic benefits of bicycling; and a strong business support base for bicycling infrastructure and programs. After the pilot ended in March, most of the above activities continue and new ones have sprouted up, like a monthly Kidical Mass ride in the family-oriented BFBD of Bixby Knolls. The media attention the program continues to receive is significant – the New York Times, Sunset, Momentum, and more.

Seeing merchants and business association leaders make regular use of the commuter bikes (outfitted with baskets) is particularly impressive. One business association uses its bike in place of a car to carrying its anti-graffiti equipment and another uses theirs to disseminate event flyers. Some take-out restaurants that previously didn’t deliver are now able to easily and affordably do so. Merchants who hadn’t ridden in decades now conduct their errands to the bank, post office, art supply store, and lunch meetings via bicycle.
San Diego, impressed by this program, just launched its own BFBD effort in seven business districts and will expand to an additional eleven in the fall of 2013. Oakville, Ontario (near Toronto) was inspired to create a community bike organization, organize regular community rides to business district restaurants and cafes, and include ‘how to get here by bike’ information on its association websites.
One of the best things about BFBDs is they can be created by business associations fairly quickly and often at very low cost. Some things are even cost-free.

(Transportation Issues Daily)
by April Economides

S.F. TRANSIT IPad app to replace jumble of radios, logs, phone calls

Another? Paper and pens.

The Bay Area’s busiest transit agency, with 700,000 boardings a day, has relied on an inefficient mixture of radios, phones, a GPS tracking system and old-fashioned handwritten reports to manage the fleet.
The cumbersome system can result in delayed responses to problems, such as several buses showing up all at once or none showing up at all, that can leave passengers fuming.

But now city transit officials are placing a lot of hope in new fleet-management technology created in 2011 specifically for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency during a civic-oriented “hackathon.” After more than a year in development, abbreviated field testing began last week. Additional tweaks will be made, with the launch of a more ambitious pilot project probably still a few weeks away.

Smart Muni is an iPad app that allows the myriad players running Muni operations to have real-time information on what’s happening with the fleet. During peak commute periods, 800 or so buses, streetcars and cable cars can be on the street at one time.

Replacing antiquated system
The software uses as its foundation the NextBus GPS data system that’s already available to pinpoint the location, speed and direction of every vehicle, and the distance, or headway, between them. That information is overlaid with the schedule for each line.
When a problem is identified, it’s entered into the system via text messages, giving staff up-to-the-minute information and the ability to communicate a plan of action and make adjustments on the fly – an ability that had been lacking.
Muni’s long-standing process for identifying problems relies on placing street inspectors at specific locations with printed schedules in hand to check whether runs are on time. Both they and staff at central control fill out forms by hand to report and track problems.
Radios and phones are used to notify various people – from agency administrators to the control center, to the maintenance shop to the operators – of the trouble, and then more rounds of calls and dispatches go out to discuss what to do.
“Now it can take 10 minutes just to get everyone involved, and that’s time wasted in getting the problem fixed,” said Davide Puglisi, Muni’s senior operations manager for transit services.

With Smart Muni, if a bus or streetcar is running behind schedule, a visual alert will blink on the screen to kick people into action. For example, if a bus breaks down, the driver will radio central control to report the problem, and then central control can shoot a text message over the iPad that will be seen immediately by supervisors on the street and mechanics to get them to the scene as quickly as possible.

If a protest blocks traffic on Market Street and holds up the buses and the F-line historic streetcars, fleet managers can start making adjustments, such as rerouting coaches and trains.

“With this kind of technology, you know exactly where (the Muni vehicles) are and what’s happening; it gives you a complete picture of the system, so when you make an adjustment on one end of the line, you can see how it affects the other. It makes operations much more efficient,” said John Haley, the agency’s director of transit.

Saving on expenses
A more efficient system, he said, will save in operating and maintenance costs – something desperately needed for San Francisco’s transit agency, which has been plagued by recurrent deficits, resulting in both planned and de facto service cuts in recent years, in part because of insufficient resources.

Among the potential benefits that riders could experience: less bunching, more service and better on-time performance.
The Smart Muni prototype emerged from a 48-hour public policy hackathon in July 2011 sponsored by the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts to see how technology could help improve local government.

To move from idea to implementation, San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation, an organization known as Sf.citi that was founded by tech mogul Ron Conway, stepped in and awarded a $100,000 grant to conduct a pilot project. AT&T agreed to lend Muni 25 iPads for the experiment, which is scheduled to run at least through the end of the year.

Eclectic team of planners
Working hand in hand with Muni employees is the hackathon team – the brains behind the interactive Smart Muni app. Members, most of them devoted Muni riders, are an eclectic bunch, among them a geographer, an architect, a transportation planner, a software developer and an urban planning student.

“We felt there was a problem out there that could be fixed,” said Emily Drennen, the transportation planner on the team, who once worked at the Municipal Transportation Agency. “The reason for this project is to improve service for passengers and make a noticeable difference in how Muni runs.”

(The San Francisco Chronicle)
Rachel Gordon
Updated 11:06 p.m., Sunday, September 9, 2012

When most think of high-speed rail in the United States, they think of the ambitious and controversial effort in California.

The project, already 16 years in the making, is subject to bitter debate among Golden State legislators — mostly about its speculative funding plan, which assumes that as much as $42 billion of its $68.4 billion price tag will come from the federal government even though no indications point to an end to domestic spending cuts any time soon.

Robert Eckels, who’s pursuing a high-speed rail project in Texas, says his company will take a different approach. “We’re not looking for a big chunk of cash from the state of Texas or the federal government,” Eckels told Governing.

Eckels, the former executive of the state’s largest county (Harris) is now president of Texas Central High-Speed Railway, which hopes to run a bullet train between Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth area by 2021. It would transport passengers about 240 miles in 90 minutes or less. “It’s an aggressive schedule,” he says, “but not unreasonable.”
What makes Texas Central’s plan different from other high-speed rail projects is that it doesn’t depend on government funds. The company is still in the early process of securing financing, conducting engineering analyses, and developing economic and environmental feasibility studies, but it could be a model worth watching — one that would be a stark contrast to the effort in California.
Eckels, for his part, insists that his company will not become a money suck for taxpayers. “I’ve enjoyed not being a part of the government,” Eckels says. “We will have a project that makes sense and is viable. We are not looking for a subsidized operation.”
Texas Central has some high-profile backers. It’s directly affiliated with U.S.-Japan High-Speed Rail, a Washington, D.C.-based company founded by an American venture capital company and Japanese high-speed rail operator Central Japan Railway Company, which would supply the technology for the endeavor. That company runs bullet trains between Tokyo and Osaka.
Eckels himself also comes with a good reputation. He gained national attention for the way he and Harris County handled the influx of New Orleans-area residents seeking shelter from Hurricane Katrina.
Eckels says Texas Central will need about $8 billion to $12 billion in investment — though that’s a rough estimate. Unlike the state-run California project, which has seen its cost estimates fluctuate from $34 billion to $43 billion to $98.5 billlion and now $68.4 billion, Texas Central will have to abide by its budget and as a private company, can’t afford to have “moving targets,” Eckels says.
“The key for us is to make sure our budget is right at the beginning,” he says. “We’re not using the government as a backstop.”
Eckels’ endeavor isn’t the first foray into high-speed rail in the state. In the 1990s, the state had a high-speed rail authority and even chose a French company to delivery a line. Eventually, the project fizzled, in part because of opposition from Texas-based Southwest Airlines. Today, things are different. Eckels says the airline — no longer just a regional carrier — won’t oppose the project, and unlike other private rail lines (such as a proposed high-speed rail line on the East Coast), this project wouldn’t compete with an existing route.
According to Eckels, Texas is the perfect place for high-speed rail, and the distance between Houston and Dallas — which takes about 4 hours to travel by car — is “the sweet spot” for a bullet train. The drive is just long enough to be tiring, and the flight is just short enough to make passengers question whether it’s worth the hassle.
There’s poised to be an increasing demand for connections between the region. Harris County and Dallas County have more workers traveling long distances — known as “super-commuters” — than anywhere else in the country, according to a report published earlier this year.
From a geographical standpoint, the area is also attractive, Eckels says, because it’s largely rural and flat.
One challenge Texas Central still needs to figure out is how passengers would get from their train stations to other locations. Both the Houston and Dallas areas have growing public transit systems, but neither is as extensive as those of major East Coast cities, where commuters can easily connect from trains to subways. Eckels says his line will partner with area transit agencies, but his stations will need easy access to freeways.

Using Federal Help, But Not Money
Though Eckels’ project would be privately funded, the federal government had already invested $15 million for the state Department of Transportation (TxDOT) to study a route between Houston and the Dallas/Fort-Worth region. A spokesman for TxDOT said the agency is in touch with Eckels’ group and sharing information with it.
TxDOT Executive Director Phil Wilson has said his agency will “try to assist them as best we can, along with anybody else who can bring this same type of initiative to us.”
Tom Shelton, senior program manager with North Central Texas Council of Governments, says the state’s goal is to eventually secure environmental clearance for a high-speed rail route and then turn it to a private-sector entity to design, build and operate.
Shelton says his organization, which conducts regional transportation planning, is coordinating with both Eckels and TxDOT, particularly with analyzing potential ridership and providing data used to determine where stations might be located.
There are at least one or two other private entities interested in pursuing work on the same corridor, Shelton says, though Eckels’ group is furthest along. “We have no allegiance to this current entity,” Shelton says. “Our interest is to get high-speed rail implemented.”
And, he adds, “Whether it’s through a public-sector model or a private-sector model, we don’t care, quite frankly.”

(GOVERNING)
POSTED BY RYAN HOLEYWELL
SEPTEMBER 6, 2012