Editorial: Improving essential infrastructure boosts the economy

The Allegheny County Sanitary Authority has gotten the green light for its $2 billion Clean Water Plan — a series of moves including expanding wastewater treatment volume and disinfection capacity as well as repairing and replacing sewer lines, diverting streams and adding pipes, diversion structures and tunnels.

The move comes on the heels of brakes being thrown on the $1 billion Pittsburgh International Airport renovation and the Penguins pulling out of the $750 million Lower Hill District development, both citing the turbulent economic state amid coronavirus pandemic response.

Say what you want about those other big-ticket projects, but the Alcosan plan is exactly the kind of investment that government and private companies alike should be evaluating and plunging forward to complete.

Do we know what will happen with air travel in a year? No. We have no way of knowing what the long-term impact of sustained downturn to the airline industry will be. A 26-story office tower might have less appeal when people come back from working from home.

But sewage and stormwater? We have every confidence that toilets will continue to flush and rain will continue to fall.

In an area cross-hatched with rivers and streams and in a state that has spent decades trying to rectify its pollution, proceeding with a project that continues to do that while supporting the best interests of its customers seems like exactly the right call now.

Because we need the big projects. The same way all the alphabet soup agencies of the 1930s helped put people to work building schools and post offices, flood control and electric generation, necessary and beneficial infrastructure projects can be a buoy in a turbulent economy again.

It is often easy to delay a big task until a later date. Those delays can ultimately cost even more money when they end up in replacement instead of repair.

That’s why every leader and every candidate — Democrat and Republican — always stresses the importance of infrastructure development. They just seldom get around to actually doing it.

This is the time to do it. A needed infrastructure project is stimulus to the economy and a lifeline to workers, and it has the added bonus of being a boon to the community and a responsible use of funds.

The Alcosan project is not new. Its clearance came from a court modification of a consent decree with the federal Environmental Protection Agency that goes back to 2008. But every authority, every municipality, every county, every state agency has a list of those projects that don’t make the cut to get done each year.

Those projects all need a critical new look.