As mayors of the largest and smallest city along the Mississippi River, we both face an equally stark choice: address the mutually dire infrastructure backlog that exists for both urban and rural America now, or stand back and watch as it continues to crumble.
A plan that simply replaces infrastructure, rather than addressing what it encompasses, will be ineffective and ultimately unaffordable. We need larger policy solutions that incentivize, propagate, and arrange a total adoption of resilience, sustainability, and climate mitigation through our economy or all we rebuild will wash away in the next multi-billion-dollar disaster.
Memphis is the world’s distribution center. More cargo moves through the Memphis International Airport than anywhere else on the globe. We’re the fourth-largest inland port in the country. Five Class I railroads run through our city, and prior to the recent fracture, more than 40,000 cars and trucks used I-40 every single day.
For years our roads, bridges, sewers, ports, harbors, airports, broadband, grids, and utilities, have been the backbone of our city. But, as we were recently harshly reminded by the fracture in the Hernando de Soto Bridge, our infrastructure is disintegrating. In Memphis alone, we have identified nearly $20 billion in current infrastructure needs — and the list grows each year.
With a resident population of 164 people, Kimmswick is the smallest city along the Mississippi River; yet the infrastructure issues we face are the same as Memphis, just at a different scale. Like so much of rural America, our dependence on infrastructure far outstrips our population. This is because commodity production (the most important activity to American trade) depends heavily on and stretches to the limit infrastructure assets from fields to roads, ports, grids, and water systems.
Memphis and Kimmswick are both convinced any national infrastructure package must include significant deployment of natural infrastructure. Natural assets such as reconnected floodplains and wetlands are the only options we can afford with the most co-benefits to naturally absorb impacts, bolster outdoor recreation and tourism, secure our drinking water, and sequester carbon at scale. The mayors along the Mississippi River have developed a plan through which America’s most important commodity corridor can be secured for at least a generation that we’re calling the Safeguarding the Mississippi River Together or SMRT Act.
Post-pandemic, the bipartisan passage of an infrastructure bill has never been more important. Our 10 state corridor has suffered from a systemic lack of investment, and disasters have cost us over $210 billion in actual losses since 2005. The need for action is clear. This type of package will bring much-needed funding in all the areas of our economy and will benefit our nation well into the future if the plan includes multi-lateral solutions like the SMRT Act. We urge Congress to place the SMRT Act in the American Jobs Plan and pass it before the cost of restoration increases beyond what our economy can muster.
Phil Stang is the mayor of Kimmswick, Missouri, and the MRCTI Missouri chair. Jim Strickland is the mayor of Memphis, Tennessee, and the MRCTI Tennessee chair.
