Dr. Russell, colleagues, talk maintenance at U.S. Senate

December 2017     No Comments

Politicians love a good ribbon cutting. The cameras, the audience, a new building to feast one’s eyes on.

But what about the building next door, once heralded as the talk of the town but that has started falling into disarray as the years waned?

“We like the next thing,” says Dr. Andrew Russell, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at SUNY Poly, referring to this practice as “the ribbon cutting paradox.”

“The ribbon gets cut on the new building, but there’s no ceremony when a sewer pipe gets fixed…and it turns out we need the fixed sewer pipe more than we need the new building.”

It’s this idea of maintaining, of keeping up the systems that we’ve built that has become a specialty of Dr. Russell, who has drawn the attention of the New York Times and recently sat on a panel of experts at the U.S. Senate for a conversation on Innovation vs. Maintenance in the Drive Toward Hybrid Infrastructure, hosted by the Information Technology & innovation Foundation.

Along with Vice President of Global Information Technology Stephen Ezell, Director of the American Society of Civil Engineers John Casana, President and CEO of Eno Center for Transportation Robert Puentes, and Virginia Tech Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Society Lee Vinsel (who is Dr. Russell’s partner in their research and writings on maintenance), the panel discussed possible solutions to aging infrastructures. The panel focused on integrating digital technology with physical infrastructure in a way to make the concrete roads and bridges of yesteryear more efficient and sustainable.

The panel of experts addressed a room of roughly 50 people in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, mostly made up of congressional office staff, staffs from various federal agencies, and representatives from trade associations.

“We had a really substantive discussion about the major themes of innovation and maintenance,” said Dr. Russell. “We’re not doing a great job with infrastructure and the main question is, if we can invest more, can we incorporate new technologies?”

The solutions they seek are very much needed, as noted by a recent D+ rating for the United States on an infrastructure report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The cost to maintain the U.S. infrastructure has hit $4.6 trillion in necessary repairs, with only $77 billion appropriated for transportation and infrastructure improvements by Congress. So the question remains how to move forward.

“That is the core issue, spending,” Dr. Russell said. “We don’t have adequate mechanisms or policies to maintain or repair the things that we’ve already built, whether that’s train infrastructure, roads, bridges, water, or sewage systems, or dams. Hundreds of billions of dollars would be needed to fix what we have. That’s the core problem, made worse by the fact that private and public investment is thrown disproportionately to new technology.”

While Dr. Russell believes that those dealing with policy matters recognize the importance of these issues, he says there is a disconnect and the problem for policy makers is moving from that recognition to putting the funding into actual budgets. He says that during the panel discussion he was asked by U.S. Senator’s staff what message she should bring back to her boss.

“I told her the first thing she should do is to start talking about maintainers in her public messaging and to talk about the important work people do, like teachers, or janitors, or technicians and nurses. These are the people who maintain society. We need to express our appreciation of them. The next step is straight forward – that if we want to, on the whole, improve and show our respect for them, to make sure their wages are better as a class, as a group, and to support their work in terms of policy.”

One of the promising aspects for the future of maintenance, Dr. Russell notes, is that it’s the type of topic that doesn’t fit within one party line or the other, making it an issue that truly reaches across the aisle of political ideology.

“Progressives really like it because it’s good for the working poor. Conservatives like it because it’s about conserving the technological achievements we’ve already built. There’s something about the idea that’s bipartisan.”

While the topic itself and its impact is recognized and felt by both sides of the aisle in Washington, Dr. Russell notes that much of the future of maintenance falls back to how it can be funded. However, he hopes that through the work of he and his colleagues, keeping the idea of maintenance on the forefront of minds versus the attractive allure and shiny veneer of new technologies and products, will help find a way to keep things working.

“I think the need to do something about this is very well established. The big challenge now is how to pay for it. So I think the contribution I’m making, along with my co-author, Lee, is to help this cultural side of things to solidify bipartisan consensus that we need to do more about it. And hopefully it gives policymakers more tools to keep maintenance at the forefront.”

And while Dr. Russell helps move the discussion about maintenance on the national stage, he’s also helping to let the world know that many programs at SUNY Poly put these ideas to practice, training students to enter the maintenance workforce, including engineering, engineering technology, network and computer security, computer science, and nursing.

In Spring 2018, he’ll begin teaching a course on maintenance – IDS 103: Science, Technology, and Human Values. He notes that part of the course will be student projects that examine the work of maintainers on our campus and in the local area.

You can watch video of the panel discussion in Washington here: https://itif.org/events/2017/11/09/innovation-vs-maintenance-drive-toward-hybrid-infrastructure.