Public Works Management & Policy

Testimony originally presented to the President’s Commission to Study Capital Budgeting proposes dividing the federal unified budget into three parts: (a) a capital investment budget that includes government spending on capital assets that have multiple-year lives and the potential to increase future productivity; (b) a pension budget that includes investments in and for current, future, and retired workers; and (c) an operating budget that reflects government spending for current consumption. Under this restructuring, the budget will lead to sound decision making on federal fiscal policy, which in turn will foster increased productivity and economic growth.

After years of debate, there is still much disagreement about the economic impacts of highway infrastructure. This article suggests that recent empirical evidence can help reconcile the divergent views on the role of highways in the economy. The resolution illuminates two ideas that should be more prominent in transportation policy. First, highways are associated with both local economic gains (often near a project) and economic losses (often distant from a project). In a system of centralized highway finance, this creates the possibility of a geographic mismatch between the areas that pay for highway projects and the areas that benefit from those projects. Second, efficiently using the available highway capital is potentially as effective as building additional highway stock in enhancing the local economic impacts of highways. Both ideas suggest the need for more decentralized, project-specific highway finance that includes a role for efficient pricing. The policy implications of a more decentralized highway finance system are discussed in the closing section of the article.

The public rights-of-way (ROW) managed by local governments have been a source of perennial conflict between municipalities, utilities, and other private companies that require access to ROWin order to distribute their services. In recent years, advances in telecommunications technology and new federal legislative initiatives have combined to create much greater demands for public ROWoccupancy and simultaneously limit the authority of local governments to regulate and charge entities for the use of ROW. Accordingly, local governments have devised and implemented a variety of fee-based mechanisms to collect revenue from private firms in exchange for their use of public ROW. This article explores the various fee structures that have evolved for permitting or applying for ROWoccupancy, obstruction or disruption, excavation or degradation, use or rental, or franchised use. It also reports briefly on the limits to local ROW management authority created by federal legislation.

The State Revolving Fund program represents a major shift in the ways governments address water quality needs. Using John Kingdon’s concept of policy streams, this study examines the formal targeting mechanisms employed by states to meet these goals and whether use of these mechanisms actually results in a greater percentage of program resources allocated to the targeted communities. The findings include the following: (a) targeting mechanisms are not widely used in states, (b) targeting makes little difference in the patterns of resource distribution to potential classes of communities, and (c) Kingdon’s notion of policy streams provides a useful heuristic to understand changes in implementation over time.

Accreditation of public works departments is a new method of improving quality of service that incorporates best management practices. Using a self-administered survey of 166 public works employees, this study examines the effects of accreditation on the towns of Greeley, Colorado, and Schaumburg, Illinois, currently the only communities to have completed the accreditation process. Results from chisquare tests and correlation coefficients indicated that communication among employees and communication between management and staff are statistically significant factors in the quality of service provided by employees. The other important factor correlated with quality of service was job knowledge that comes from the accreditation process. Findings suggest that benefits from accreditation, such as increased communication and job knowledge, are not captured in traditional performance measures of public works departments. Conclusions suggest that although higher quality of service can be a reason to pursue accreditation, administrators should consider survey techniques to capture its benefits.

A clear set of definitions is a necessary starting point for the discussion of privatization and its value for the public works industry. With the abundance of terms currently in use, a standard lexicon needs to be developed and adopted by the industry. Once defined, the terms will provide for a more precise discussion of privatization services and their benefits.