Where is all the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding going in Hawaii?

This question from a Civil Beat reader arrived via email as we zoom past the second anniversary of the signing of the $1.2 trillion IIJA, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

No surprise that far and away the largest share of the $1.4 billion so far announced for Hawaii will end up under our car tires. A billion dollars of that is going to transportation, including $700 million to roads and bridges.

That’ll be welcome news to users of the Ola Lane Overpass to the Likelike Highway off-ramp on Oahu or Olohena Road on Kauai, among the 74 bridges and 612 miles of highway in Hawaii currently in “poor condition,” according to some understatement from the White House.

A total of $1.5 billion will be spent on bridges and roads in the next five years in Hawaii while public transit will not fare as well, anticipated to receive $316 million over the same period. Airports, ports and waterways will also get large chunks.

Adie Tomer of the Brookings Institution, who tracks infrastructure spending as part of his job, said the majority of the funds in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law went to the federal Department of Transportation and will end up on the islands as non-competitive formula funding — predetermined amounts of money to the state set by Congress.

States have a fair amount of latitude with how they spend those funds, Tomer said.

The BIL was different than past infrastructure bills because it put multiple sector authorizations under one roof, he said.

“So broadband, water transport, even a bunch of obviously energy and natural resource programs,” Tomer said. “This is kind of like our first broadband bill of modern times since 1996, and it’s actually hiding inside a bigger bill.”

Broadband access in the state is expected to receive a $150 million boost to connect unserved and underserved households. The $37 million toward Hawaiian Telcom’s plan for new undersea cables announced in June is a portion of that. Water infrastructure projects here have received $144 million for the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years.

At the lower end of the scale are a number of grants to the Department of Land and Natural Resources for local wildfire defense and preparation programs for at-risk communities on the Big Island and Kauai that all cost less than $85,000 and will no doubt feel like money well spent.

A significant portion of the BIL money is intended to go toward building new things and on that point, Tomer cautions officials that the sticker price for a capital project rarely reflects the ongoing repair and maintenance it might require.

“The way the system is set up, it becomes way too easy to not understand your long-term fiscal burden and so it becomes much easier to think about the shiny new toys,” the Brookings expert said.

Tomer wasn’t thinking about the proposed, and somewhat controversial, Ala Wai Canal pedestrian bridge in Honolulu that got $25 million from the bill toward its estimated $63 million total cost, but he could have been.

“If there’s one thing I want to do is try to raise that particular issue because we’re certainly seeing that in terms of infrastructure planning, just a lack of conversation about those longer term financial burdens,” he said.

We don’t yet have a complete picture of all the projects that will be funded by the BIL so we have created a database that can be searched by county, agency name and a range of other filters.

It will be available on our data page and updated every month for the foreseeable future.

Mapping Climate Vulnerability

If you're fatigued by grim news about climate change, Weihsueh Chiu, a professor at Texas A&M University knows how you feel.

He conceived the idea for a new online tool that measures climate vulnerability down to the level of U.S. counties and census tracts and took it to the folks at the Environmental Defense Fund to build it out.

Let's note here that the nonprofit EDF co-funded the project with Texas A&M and has a political action committee that supports candidates on environmental issues.

However, the data sources that underpin the index are public, coming from agencies that include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Census Bureau and the state-run Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The data sources also are all available to download for scrutiny by researchers.

Chiu said his hope in creating the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index was that users would be able to go beyond doomscrolling. "Our vision is for people to use this to actually identify where they can make a difference and where to advocate for change," he said.

The tool is unique in aligning 184 different indicators on health, environment, infrastructure and social characteristics with historical and projected climate for a selected area, Chiu said.

A community baseline for Lanai, for example, shows low vulnerability for air pollution, but assesses it highly vulnerable for access to care, risk of flooding and the potential for temperature-related deaths.

Those insights can give federal and local agencies, nonprofits and community groups more means to make informed decisions about future infrastructure investments, Chiu said.

He thinks the index can also help provide accountability, including tracking the effectiveness of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law spending over time.

"The Biden administration say they want to devote resources to these underserved communities," Chiu said. "They want to improve climate resilience things like that. Do those improvement show up later in the data? So, longer term that would be an important use of this as well."