General contractors, engineers and architectural firms watch school bond elections carefully because the bond packages represent upcoming opportunities worth billions of dollars. One must wonder why thousands of other types of firms are not watching bond elections as diligently also. When a bond referendum is passed at any jurisdictional level, the contracting opportunities are not […]
City, county and state officials are watching a gathering storm carefully. It’s potentially ominous… and it is capable of making a direct hit on any governmental jurisdiction in the U.S.! A backlog of deferred maintenance threatens to wreak havoc on credit ratings and create enough chaos to generate dangerous scrutiny for elected officials. There are […]
Texas is on a course to build the state’s longest oil pipeline in almost a decade. Financing for the 730-mile oil pipeline has been secured and although a construction start date has not been announced, the plan is for the project to be completed by 2019. The Eagle Ford, Permian, Ingleside and Corpus (“EPIC”) pipeline […]
Congestion in Congress created by major legislative issues has President Donald Trump’s proposed $1 trillion infrastructure plan stuck in traffic. Much to the dismay of state and local officials, few details of the plan have been released, other than that the President has promised an infusion of $1 trillion in both public and private funds […]
Safety on college campuses has never been easy or simple. Now, the responsibility is truly awesome. In the last few years, there have been dozens of horrific incidents and now that a number of states allow guns on campus, the job of providing safety on college campuses has become increasingly more difficult and complicated. Most […]
The U.S. Department of Education reports that state and local spending on prisons and jails in the U.S. has increased at triple the rate of funding for K-12 public education in the last three decades. What a horrible revelation…enough to shock even the most cynical reader I suspect! Correction experts are trying hard and many […]
There’s lots of news about major cities launching public-private partnerships (P3s) to rebuild, upgrade and improve urban assets. The P3s have become attractive because of a lack of public funding and an abundance of private-sector capital just waiting to be tapped. But, there’s not much news about P3s in smaller cities or in rural areas. […]