Election 2012 is over and we’re right back where we started – same president, same majorities in the House and Senate. Essentially nothing has changed except for the urgency to get the nation’s transportation crisis solved. With every passing day it becomes more urgent.
It’s a presidential election year and in what amounts to the nastiest campaign in modern memory, no one is talking about infrastructure. It’s like the passage of Map-21 was the end of that discussion.
Now that MAP-21 has passed, and we have a brief respite from the transportation-funding crisis in this country, let’s turn our attention to matters that are a direct outgrowth of projections for improved market conditions in the coming years.
Unless you have been living under – pun oh so certainly intended – a rock, for the past month or so, you know that Congress passed, and President Obama signed, the Moving Ahead For Progress In The 21st Century Act (MAP-21). The legislative package will fund construction of the nation’s roads, bridges and mass transit for the next 27 months, and assures the employment of 3 million Americans in the construction industry.
As I sat around a table in a fine establishment in Buxton, England, eating and drinking with representatives from quarrying magazines in the U.K., Australia and France, it became apparent to me that we had solved all of the problems of the global aggregates industry, not to mention the entire world.
