(logo whooshing) (bright upbeat music) - Welcome to "At Issue."

I'm H Wayne Wilson.

Thank you so much, as always, for joining us.

In the state of Illinois, there are 145,000 miles of roadway, and that includes the third most mileage of interstates in the United States.

7,000 miles of rail line in the state of Illinois, the second most in the United States.

And in addition to that, this number amazes me, 736 million passenger boardings on mass transit in the state of Illinois.

And there's a man responsible for all of that.

He oversees all of that and much more.

We're going to talk about that and the Rebuild Illinois project with the Illinois Secretary of Transportation, Omer Osman.

Thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for having me.

- Before we talk about Rebuild Illinois and the federal bill, just a little bit of background.

You came from Sudan.

- Yes.

- [H Wayne] And went to school in Louisiana.

- In Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

- And then what brought you to Peoria many years ago?

- Well, the Illinois Department of Transportation happened to be on campus in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, interviewing.

And I did the interviews with them, and back then we didn't have internet.

You couldn't check on Peoria, you don't have any background.

So I just happened to ask the question of, what is Peoria, where is Peoria?

So they did, this is the folks from the Illinois Department of Transportation.

They did tell me a little bit about Peoria.

They did tell me about the fact that Caterpillar is headquartered here.

And from somebody who's coming from overseas, Caterpillar is a known quantity.

So I kind of, you know, I saw the connection there, so I wanted to be in Peoria, yeah.

- Before we talk about the project, the six-year project, Rebuild Illinois what before Rebuild, what condition was transportation in, in the state of Illinois?

- Before Rebuild, we were declining, and declining rapidly for 10 years or so.

We didn't have any sustainable funding, so we couldn't do the projects like the I 74-project we have done through Peoria some 15, 20 years ago.

We could couldn't keep up with the deterioration of our system at large.

So we were doing minimal, we were just doing minimal work, but we were not catching up.

So the backlog was getting bigger and bigger, to the point I think the ASCE, the national organization, gave us a grade of a C, which we're not very proud of.

I wouldn't want to take that home as a grade.

So we started, we knew the need.

We knew our funding needs were massive, and we knew we needed to do something.

So 2019 thankfully, Rebuild Illinois came through, through our good legislators, and our governor pushed it and were successful in that.

It did give us the extra cashflow that we actually need to start pushing projects out, and to start doing some sort of a catch-up as we go along.

- Just a reminder to the audience that ASCE is the American Society of Civil Engineers.

- [Omer] Right, absolutely.

- So $45 billion.

- Indeed.

- Over a six year period.

- Indeed.

- Almost 75% of that is under your umbrella.

- Right.

- Some of the other stuff is some vertical, and some broadband, et cetera.

- Right.

- That's a huge amount of money.

- [Omer] It is.

- How do you go about determining what projects to do?

Why do the McClugage bridge?

Why do the Murray Baker redecking?

- We, as the Department of Transportation, just talk about the backlog.

Those backlog, we have been studying these projects.

We have been assessing the condition of our existing infrastructure for quite a while.

So we have multitude of information that tells us what condition our bridges are in today, what condition they could possibly be a few years down the road.

So as such, we prioritize our need based on every year's available funding, and we schedule those projects based on the actual need.

So it's a data driven process.

And the 45 billion you talked about, 75% of which is going to transportation, I could also say two-thirds of that 75% actually goes into what you would call an asset management.

We are trying to manage the asset as we have it today, and upgrade it, so it will be sustainable.

- For instance, when you're talking about asset management, the I-74 on either side of the Illinois River going towards Bloomington from Peoria, and going out west.

Repaving, but some of that was bridge work?

- [Omer] Yes.

- Is that maintenance, is that what we're talking about?

- It is, it is.

As long as we're not adding a lane, as long as we're not building a new roadway on a new alignment or a new bridge on a new alignment, we are still managing the asset as we see.

So every time we do a resurfacing, every time, right now at the interchange of I-74, and 474 on Route Six, we are fixing or repairing the decks of two bridges as we speak.

That is what we mean by managing the asset as we have it.

We're trying to extend the life of the asset we have today.

- Was the construction industry ready for a six-year, in your case, $33 billion bill?

I mean, that's a lot of new jobs.

- [Omer] Indeed.

- Are there enough construction?

- We do have enough construction contractors.

We do have multiple skilled labor out there sustaining these jobs.

I could tell you, during the pandemic in 2020, the state of Illinois had over a thousand active contracts, and they were actually active, meaning none of them stopped.

We still have enough labor out there, skilled workers.

We still have enough contractors, subcontractors actually working on these projects.

- And in order to maintain the level of quality contractors, you have a program that you work in conjunction with a dozen community colleges?

- Right, that's what you would call the HCCP, the Highway Construction Career Program.

It's a program we have had for a few years, and it is a program that is paid for by state of Illinois and also by the Federal Highway.

And what that does is, we invest in 12 community colleges across the state of Illinois, including ICC, Blackhawk College, Lincoln College, Parkland College, all the way up.

In Chicagoland there is a few colleges we support too.

And what that does is they do extensive training, especially for minorities, especially for a female.

What we try to do is through those programs, we're trying to diversify the workers out there, and we're trying to provide the skilled worker for the future.

As you know, the skilled worker, you know, we still have good workers out there, but that's an aging group.

As some of them retire, and we need to keep providing those skilled workers, the young ones, we need to bring them into our transportation fold.

- We've heard a lot of discussion across the country in all fields that there aren't, everybody has a hiring sign out front.

- Right, right.

- Has this impacted these projects?

- You know it did not, not yet.

We haven't seen that yet.

Where we might have seen a little bit of an impact is for truck drivers, CDL, and that's a national phenomenon right now.

Those truck drivers are needed by us as a department, and obviously they are needed by the contractors out there, in the form of, they are the ones that are hauling the asphalt out there to the job site.

They are the ones who are driving the cement trucks.

They are the ones who are hauling the gravel from the pits and whatnot to the job site.

We have seen a little bit of a tightening up of the market, but we have not see it impact our projects in a detrimental way yet.

- How has this Rebuild Illinois project being funded?

- The Rebuild Illinois project, this in 2019, I think we increased the gas tax by a tone of 19.3.

And there is, there was an increase in the motor vehicle registration and the title registration.

That is what is giving us most of the funding, from the state side.

On top of that, there was a federal component to it that we typically get from the Federal Authority on an annual basis.

And you add some of the locals, especially say the city of Chicago, Cook County, they have their own authority to increase their own taxes.

You add everything up and that's where you wind up with the $45 billion, or $33 billion specifically for transportation.

- So gas tax went from 19 to 38 in round numbers.

- Yes.

- License plate renewal, 101 to 151.

- [Omer] Right.

- And then there's a gambling component, but that's not for surface.

- I think the gambling is, is it's not for surface, it's not for the horizontal work, it's for the vertical.

So those will be for the building especially in governmental agencies, building and on the state universities and the like.

That's what it's supposed to support.

- We know in the past that transportation funds were, if I may use the term, rated for other needs, which had to be completely frustrating.

- Right.

- But that's been taken care of, or at least, has it been taken care of by this lockbox?

- Lockbox, yes.

- The passage of that act.

- Right, and that was perhaps about five, six years ago, when that act came through.

And what that meant is, it dictated that the money that is being, the taxes that are being paid for transportation actually goes to transportation and nothing else.

That gives the Department and the industry the ability to forecast for down the road.

It gives you a clear idea of how much money would you have five years down the road, 10 years down the road.

'Cause some of those projects are so complex, you're just gonna have to, you plan of it, you plan the project and you design it and it takes time.

But you don't wanna go through all those activities not knowing if you have the money to construct it on that.

That is a comfort level that lockbox gave us at the Department of Transportation.

The same for the local agencies, say Peoria County Department of Highway, the city of Peoria and the likes.

Everybody, it just gave us that comfort level of knowing what are you gonna have down the road.

- I wanna clarify for the audience's benefit, that the gas tax went to 38 cents.

- Right.

- [H Wayne] But there's a sales tax on top of that.

- Right.

- And that had been rated, if I may use the term again.

The transportation share of that state tax and sales tax now goes to transportation as well.

- It does, yes, yes.

- So the federal project, the federal Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act, how does that mesh with Rebuild Illinois?

- It complements what we've been trying to do since 2019 in a perfect way.

If you look at the IJAA, the jobs act and look at where the funding is going, and it almost mirrors where we allocated our Rebuild Illinois funds.

So it does give us, first of all, about 31, 32% increase in the federal dollar that is coming to the state of Illinois.

There is an element of it, that is $1.4 billion specifically, is slated for bridges and is 100% federal funding, being that the state of Illinois does not have to come up with a match.

100% federal funding, and those are specifically slated just for bridges, not roadways, 1.4 billion.

Then you get a 9.2 billion over the next five years.

Those are slated for roadways.

This is what the state of Illinois is gonna get.

And then there is about $4 billion that's going to mass transit across the state of Illinois.

So it's huge, it's monumental, and it's gonna help us, you know, leap frog.

It's gonna help us push some of our projects that we thought we would do in a lottery or a multi-year program.

We will have the ability to push some of those projects and to accelerate them and do them faster.

So the gap that we've been trying to close, in as far as taking care of the backlog, that is gonna help us close that gap in much faster ways, the way we are looking at it.

- You mentioned mass transit.

- Yes.

- What role does IDOT play in keeping, I mean 736 million trips in each year.

What role does IDOT play in that?

- IDOT becomes the primary funding source, or sometime the pass-through from the federal, for us to support say the mass transit, mass transit system.

In the Chicago, the metro, it's the Pace and the CTA.

The CityLink on, if you go to Bloomington, if you go to Chicago, each and every good size city have their own mass transit system.

Our role is to fund them.

Our role is to look at the projects and ensure that those projects are prioritized based on the need, and just to get that federal funding flowing through the state of Illinois, that's our basic role.

- Does that include the purchase of buses, et cetera?

- It does, it does include purchase of buses.

It does include, if you have a new transit center you are rebuilding and you have an old one, all that, even the vertical side of it is, that is part.

Look at the Uptown perhaps, in Bloomington.

Those type of infrastructure work is what that transit funding goes to.

- So IDOT, and I assume federal money played a big role in Normal.

- Yes, it's huge.

- [H Wayne] With the transportation center.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

- A little known aspect of the Department of Transportation, at least to many people, would be the division of aeronautics.

- Yes.

- In truncated form, explain the role of IDOT in handling those.

- It's almost similar to the way we handle transit.

The division of aeronautics is in Springfield.

That's the headquarter.

Actually, our building is part of the Springfield airport, Abraham Lincoln airport, so that's where we have our headquarter of aeronautics.

And their role is, there is about 78 or so airports in the state of Illinois, including obviously O'Hare and Midway.

Those are the two largest, but you look across the state, there is about 78 of them.

So all the horizontal work that is being done in these airports, the runway extension, the taxiway extension and the likes, the funding for those comes from the federal side and then from the state side, and some of it, obviously from the local side, too.

There's about 5% from the local side that goes into these projects.

Our role is similar to transit, is to funnel the funding, the federal funding to the airport authorities to oversee some of the design.

That is through our technical engineering bureaus within the aeronautics section.

To review and just to approve these projects basically.

- So you don't handle control towers, you don't handle- - Not very typical for us, yeah.

- And now I wanna talk about, a little bit about the individual projects that have taken place in Central Illinois.

We mentioned I-74 in either direction from the Illinois River.

But two big bridge projects.

Let's talk about the one that's been completed, the Murray Baker.

- Yes.

- What, was that a redecking?

- It was a redecking, and it was timely.

Not only the redecking, a lot of the work was done underneath the deck, 'cause there was a lot of structural element, structural steel that was deteriorated.

So on top of putting a new deck on, we managed to replace a lot of the elements of the structural steel down below.

And then as everybody perhaps knows, the lighting system, we have installed that, and we did the entire project in about 10 months, I believe.

We had the entire interstate shut down, and that was, we had the ability to do that.

Obviously Peoria is blessed with a lot of bridges.

You have the Bob Michael, you have the Sierra Street bridges, you have the other bridges and you have the McClugage where you're still functioning, we haven't shut anything down.

So that gave us the ability to shut the Murray Baker Bridge and do that in a much, much faster time.

- You didn't pay for the lights, but you put in the lights, is that a fair- - I think the state of Illinois did pay for the lights.

- [H Wayne] Okay, all right.

- That was part of Rebuild Illinois, and we made a commitment to, because we knew both communities needed the light.

We knew Peoria was looking at that light concept for quite a while, and we took the opportunity of Rebuild Illinois coming through, and we funded the actual installation of the light, yeah.

- The bigger project, a huge project, is the McClugage.

- Right, yes indeed.

- [H Wayne] Just describe it in, just in basic terms.

- Okay, this is huge in the sense that it's around 146, $150 million, with the original bid from the contractor.

It's huge in the sense that it's not gonna be done until 1923, probably- - 2023.

- Yeah, 2023 rather, thank you, tail end of 2023.

So it's gonna take, and you see the basic elements of it if you drive by today, you start seeing the shape of the new bridge coming up.

It's massive, I have visited that job a couple of times.

It makes you wonder about the ingenuity, first of all, of our skilled workers on how much steel is being put in those pillars and cover them, and how that bridge is shaping up.

It's gonna be a brand new bridge, and it's gonna be beautiful.

- Is there something unique about the superstructure on it?

- The poundage of the structural steel is amazing.

I don't remember the number, but it's massive.

- What happens to the old eastbound bridge?

- Oh, we're gonna take that out as soon as we, you know, we let traffic go out on the brand new bridge, perhaps on the tail end of 2023, or going into 2024 is when we have to remove the existing bridge that we see today.

- A smaller project, but important in many people's minds is the Pine Crest interchange.

That bridge is subject to being hit.

- Yes.

- [H Wayne] Did you raise the elevation?

- That was the basic idea behind the project, just to raise it, and I think, I've been working out of pure for some 20-some years before I went to Springfield, but my recollection is just on a yearly basis, somebody was hitting that bridge.

And some of the hits were to the point that it was costing us a lot of money to go in there, replace a beam, or two beams, or shut it down.

So it was disruptive to the traffic in that area and it was costing us money on a yearly basis so once again, we took advantage of Rebuild Illinois, once we saw that good cash flow coming into us, and we decided to accelerate the design on that bridge and put that to construction, and that's what we're seeing today.

- Many Peorians would want to know the answer to passenger rail to Chicago.

- Yes.

- Where do we stand on the possibility of bringing in rail to Chicago from Peoria?

- We are, I know the community is very much interested in a passenger rail to Chicago and beyond.

At the Department of Transportation, we are funding a study that, and we have a consultant looking into gathering basic information, looking into the ridership.

Perhaps in a few weeks, a couple of weeks or so, perhaps we might be able to send a survey out, within the community here and within other communities.

I think the line that is being looked at is going through Morris through Ottawa, through LaSalle area, kinda hugging I-80 and coming down on Route 29.

So we're going to be sending out surveys, asking people about their basic thoughts, you know would they be, try and find out through that survey, what kind of rideability we're gonna have, what kind of interest the general public is having or not.

So we are in the beginning stages of that project, but we know it's very, very important to the city of Peoria and to the communities outside of Peoria too.

- And (clearing throat) excuse me, what role do you play in Amtrak trains?

Because some of them are partially state supported and others are not some of those routes.

- Right, it is very typical for the partial supported, you're looking at perhaps, maybe Chicago to Quincy, and sometimes, and we support Chicago to Carbondale.

Those are, historically been supported by the state because they provide additional rides between major cities and university towns.

So typically you'll look at those, and when we support them financially what we're doing is we're paying for the cost of the cars, the cost of operating the trains, and the cost of the employee operating those trains.

So it's a service from the state of Illinois, trying to make it easier, especially for students and whatnot, to make it from the big cities to smaller towns.

- A final thought if I might Secretary, and that is, it's no secret that you want to reduce the number of accidents, the number of injuries and deaths.

- Right.

- How much of a consideration does IDOT give to that when they design a bridge, an entrance ramp, a highway intersection?

- Right, that is the number one focus.

If you recall, we did talk about I-74.

If you recall, prior to us rebuilding I-74, you'll recall the ramp going into the marrow break or on the breach side, or the 10-mile-an-hour ramp we used to have on the East Peoria side.

Those are geometrically deficient, old design, and that's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to upgrade the system as it is, take care of geometric deficiencies, look at the high-accident locations as we know them, because we have reports all the high accident locations, and that's what we focus on.

- And with that our conversation must come to an end because our half hour has come to an end.

- Thank you.

- [H Wayne] Omer Osman, Illinois Transportation Secretary, thank you for joining us on "At Issue".

- Well thank you for having me, appreciate it.

- And we'll be back next time with another edition of "At Issue", when we'll be talking to the president of the Illinois Farm Bureau.

Agriculture on the next "At Issue".

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