Report: Hudson Valley’s infrastructure faces neglect

Newburgh City Engineer Jason Morris explained in a recent survey that the city”™s wastewater collection system has had several failures in recent years.

“The system is more than 100 years old and extensive upgrades are necessary to prevent future failures, increase efficiency and reduce combined sewer overflow events through the city”™s combined sewer overflows,” he said.

Upgrades won”™t come cheap, but putting off nonemergency upgrades is meaning a larger price tag down the road and possibly contributing to a regional infrastructure crisis. Failing infrastructure could scare away potential private enterprise and slow economic development, analysts say.

The Hudson Valley”™s infrastructure is deteriorating and municipalities in the nine-county region aren”™t doing enough to maintain their aging water, sewer and road systems, according to a new report.

Pattern for Progress, a Newburgh-based business and education advocacy group, released a report called “Infrastructure Planning and Investment: A Widening Gap” that collected responses from 126 out of 238 municipalities in the Hudson Valley. The report focused on everyday infrastructure rather than on “national headline” projects such as Hudson River crossings.

“As citizens we expect our infrastructure to work and work well,” the report stated. “When it works, people barely notice it. But when it doesn”™t, it affects us all.”

Sixty percent of respondents said their water infrastructure needed work in the next three years or was at risk of “imminent failure.” Sewer, roads and bridges were tagged as needing major repairs in the next three years by 51 percent, 42 percent and 49 percent, respectively. There are more than 3,000 bridges in the Hudson Valley aside from the major crossings, according to the report. The Federal Highway Administration said that 13 percent of the area”™s bridges are deficient and 32 percent of bridges in the region are obsolete.

The report found that Hudson Valley cities, towns and villages spent significantly less of their budgets on infrastructure between 2002 and 2012. It also found the relative share of infrastructure to total budget in cities, towns and villages dropped 41 percent, 16.9 percent and 17 percent, respectively. County budgets did see an increase over that period, to the tune of a 5.2 percent increase.

This may be further complicated by a New York state tax cap that went into effect in 2011. The cap limits the size of annual property tax levies and infrastructure repairs are not exempted costs under the cap. The flow of funding from the federal government in recent years has also slowed, the report stated.

Putting off routine asset management is a multimillion-dollar problem. According to the Cornell Local Roads Program, $1 spent on maintenance at the routine maintenance stage will save as much as $5 in major rehabilitation in the future.

One of the most telling results from the report is that 57 percent of the municipalities that responded do not do capital improvement planning. Also, many of those respondents had only recently implemented planning as part of their budgeting process.

March Gallagher, chief strategy officer for Pattern, spoke at the group”™s May 19 conference on infrastructure.

“They do not plan, they do not look at cost five years out, they can”™t necessarily tell you what they have to spend in infrastructure in the next five years,” she told attendees. “That”™s crazy, you could never run a business like that.”

In its report, Pattern made eight recommendations including asset planning and capital project planning. The group recommended shared services and regional planning for infrastructure and exploring possibilities of public-private partnerships in lieu of tightened discretionary budget expenditures.

Most municipalities polled said they were already collaborating with other agencies, county governments and state agencies, while many others were interested with future collaborations. Still, there seems to be some resistance to a shared approach ”“ 6.6 percent were not interested in intermunicipality collaboration, 10.6 percent didn”™t want to collaborate with the county and 14.5 percent weren”™t interested in collaboration with state agencies.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation a D-plus grade for its infrastructure in 2013, the report stated, and the U.S. has fallen behind countries such as China, Japan and South Korea in the percent of gross domestic product spent on infrastructure.

Woodstock Town Supervisor Jeremy Wilbur, one of the respondents, was quoted in the report as saying elected officials needed to explain the need for short-term investment and how it will save money long-term.

“Better to spend the dime now than the dollar later,” he said. “The next generation will look back upon us kindly.”

Pattern for Progress defines the Hudson Valley region as Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester counties.