Infrastructure

Brendan’s Plan to Build a 21st Century Network

If there’s one thing every Michigander agrees with, it’s this: our infrastructure is in dire need of repair. Driving down John R Road feels like the childhood game hot lava, and portions of Silver Bell Road are downright terrifying for several months every year. For Metro Detroiters, this means an average spending of $865 on car maintenance related to poor road conditions—nearly $500 more than the national average. To actually “Fix The Damn Roads” we need to find long-term solutions, not just quick fixes, and this requires working across the aisle as well as across the urban-rural divide. 

So here’s my plan:

Transportation Infrastructure

  • Invest in quality building materials that can weather every Michigan season. Michigan must continue to support grants to research and study better and longer-lasting construction materials for our roads and bridges. We have seen promise in many alternative road materials and more become available as technology improves. 

  • Reevaluate the efficacy of road construction warranties. Michigan uses more road warranties than any other state in the nation, but the state has collected almost no data on whether these are a waste of taxpayer dollars. In theory, they could help guarantee the quality of road construction and provide the state with free maintenance in the event that roads crumble prematurely. However, Ohio and Wisconsin cancelled their warranty programs after discovering that they systematically resulted in outlandish costs and worse construction quality.

  • Support innovative transportation reengineering by securing funding for good road reconfigurations, like the replacement of standard intersections with roundabouts. Rochester Hills has been a leader in transitioning to this new road configuration, which has been proven to both improve safety and decrease traffic congestion.

  • Continue pushing Michigan ahead of the curve to keep our state competitive on autonomous vehicle research and development. While the University of Michigan’s MCity provides an exceptional facility for autonomous vehicle research, our state’s public infrastructure must continue to be readily prepared for this new technology. Autonomous vehicles have already been tested in Grand Rapids, Detroit, and Ann Arbor, but Michigan must continue to lead the way, nation-wide.

  • Encourage the expansion of Michigan’s on-the-road electric vehicle (EV) charging network by supporting state grants to private businesses, restaurants, parking garages, and multi-unit housing facilities to install charging and fast charging stations for EVs. The state should also install or lease space for electric charging stations in state parks, and on other state properties to both augment the EV charging network and generate state revenue.

Critical Utilities Infrastructure

  • Work with municipalities to identify and remove all lead water pipes. Since the Flint Water Crisis began, Michigan has been a leading state on strict lead level requirements. However, many cities have fought back, saying that the financial burden of removing the lead pipes is too extreme. The State of Michigan must be both fervent in its commitment to the health of our neighbors and also accessible to working with municipalities to ensure that this reality can come to fruition. We don’t have time to wait. Read more about my plan for Michigan’s water infrastructure in my Water plan.

  • Remove the threat of a rupturing Enbridge Line 5. A rogue anchor strike in 2018 damaged the 67-year-old Enbridge Line 5 oil and natural gas pipeline and could have had potentially catastrophic repercussions on our Great Lakes. The line sustained yet additional major structural damage in June 2020, leading to its temporary shutdown. The pipeline is a critical component of Michigan’s energy infrastructure, currently supplying the fuel needed to power thousands of homes in both peninsulas, as well as most of Metro Detroit’s automotive gasoline and Detroit Metro Airport’s jet fuel. That being said, unless they pass independent, third-party safety inspections, pipelines that run under our Great Lakes should not operate.

  • Encourage communities and property owners to use green infrastructure such as permeable pavement and rain gardens to soak up as much rainwater into the earth as possible before it can collect contaminants like spilled gasoline and lawn fertilizer. When rainwater falls and passes along impervious surfaces, it is stained by these pollutants and then enters our stormwater systems, pushing those pollutants directly into the Great Lakes.

  • Prevent human waste from contaminating our fresh water system by implementing a statewide septic code. Michigan remains the only state in the United States that lacks a basic statewide septic code, and as a consequence, 25 to 30 percent of Michigan’s 1.4 million septic systems are failing and leaking raw and untreated sewage into our Great Lakes water system.

  • Improve and expand broadband access for all Michiganders. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown just how important internet access is to our communities and citizens. The internet is no longer a luxury, but a necessary utility. Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission estimates that 5.74 percent of Michigan's population - 573,426 people - have no broadband providers in their area, and only 62.32 percent have more than one option for high-speed internet. Michigan could, for instance, support public private partnerships and state and local programs that increase funding, or borrow legislative models from Indiana and Iowa to incentivize companies to expand coverage. 

  • Encourage intersystem cooperation by enacting “dig once” laws, which require states or localities to install conduit—the empty pipe that internet and electrical cables run through—when building or upgrading infrastructure, such as roads, sidewalks, and bridges. These statutes are meant to encourage fiber investment because the land will not need to be dug up for future projects— minimizing frustration for residents, limiting costs for providers and government, and maintaining road agencies’ statutory authority to protect the road right-of-way for general physical planning purposes.

  • Support state laws to improve public transportation in Michigan, especially in Oakland County/Metro Detroit. It might seem like I misplaced this point, since it is inherently about transportation, but public transportation very much functions like a utility: available to all who need it to perform basic everyday functions, and best-functioning in monopolistic business ecosystems. The Rochester area has infamously excluded its residents from integration with our neighboring communities and the greater Metro Detroit economy by refusing to integrate a public transit system. But the economics of this issue are clear: every $1 invested in public transportation generates $4 in economic returns, according to the American Public Transportation Association. 

Environmental Infrastructure

  • Increase accountability and transparency surrounding the safety of existential infrastructure. As we just saw near Midland, $175 million of damage was caused because of failed infrastructure, including the destruction of 150 homes, only 8 percent of which had necessary insurance. The Edenville Dam, built in 1924, had been rated unsatisfactory by Michigan in a 2018 inspection, and the company that operates it had been in hot water with federal regulators for noncompliance. Infrastructure that has a direct impact on the passive safety of Michiganders must be held to a higher standard. Inspections should be conducted annually, with records available to residents, and companies must be held accountable.

PlansBrendan Johnson