16 percent of Georgia’s 14,790 bridges need repair

If President-elect Donald Trump is successful with his proposed $1 trillion, 10-year program to fix America’s disintegrating and inadequate infrastructure, the states have a list of critical projects handy for him. And while a trillion could be a decent down payment, it’s not nearly enough.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that fixing all the roads, bridges, public transit, railroads, energy systems, schools, public parks, ports, airports, waste systems, levees, dams, drinking water facilities and hazardous waste installations in the 50 states and the District of Columbia would take $3.6 trillion by 2020. That’s a little over three years from now, not the 10 years Trump is touting.

The civil engineers group has ranked the states with a “report card” on their infrastructure. No state scored higher than a C-plus. The country scored a D-plus.

That the nation’s dilapidated infrastructure appears high on the agenda of the incoming president heartens many state officials. But they’re concerned over the financing.

“The fact that [Trump] seems to go back to infrastructure as a priority, even when he’s not specifically asked about it, does lend itself to the belief that it is one of the bedrock priorities of the new administration,” said Joung Lee, policy director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

However, Lee said, a key part of dealing with infrastructure has to be on the “spending side,” i.e., taxes to finance the work. That’s a topic Trump is less inclined to talk about.

Instead of tax hikes, Trump has proposed a series of tax credits for infrastructure. He maintains that the money lost to the U.S. Department of the Treasury through the tax credits would be made up by increased personal income taxes paid by workers hired on the projects and by business taxes paid by the construction companies that hire them.

University of California-Irvine business school professor Peter Navarro, a Trump adviser, estimated that every $200 billion in additional spending on infrastructure creates $88 billion more in wages and increases the nation’s economic output, or gross domestic product, by more than 1 percentage point. Navarro also said the Trump plan would provide “maximum flexibility to the states” by streamlining permits and approvals.

In a sentiment echoed by many state leaders, Rhode Island Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo told reporters in Providence that she would be happy to accept Trump’s proposal. “We can certainly use that money for airports, money for trains, train stations and train tracks, money for roads and bridges, money for Wi-Fi,” she said.

Her spokesman, David Ortiz, amplified the statement but noted that for the program to be effective it would have to be financed by “more than just tax credits.”

Much of the nation’s transportation system is a state-federal responsibility, and the federal government hasn’t been investing