The environmental regulatory movement that started in the 1960s resulted in a bias for project developers to ask themselves, “What is the least action I can take to satisfy regulators given overall costs, benefits and risks?”
California is in a more complex position today -- population continues to increase in an already crowded state; infrastructure that needs to be both rehabbed and expanded (for 25 million more people expected to come here); and now the issue of sustainability.
A better question for public and private sector managers who design and build California’s infrastructure is to ask, “What is the best action we can take to produce value for customers, make smarter use of resources, and deliver bottom-line results to us?”
This is also a more challenging question.
The answer is that infrastructure solutions need to pragmatically integrate sustainability in three areas -- economic, technical and environmental. It gets complicated because regulatory agencies look only at the environmental.
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