Emergency Bridge Investment Act

A bill that creates a Rainy day fund for bridge construction and creates the National Bridge Database that keeps track of every bridge’s condition.

Article 1 - Infrastructure Rainy Day Fund

1.1 - The Assembly hereby creates the Infrastructure Rainy Day Fund (IRDF) managed by the Ministry of Transportation.

1.2 - The Assembly will be required to dedicate 0.5% of GDP to the Rainy Day Fund.

1.3 - The Ministry of Transportation must use the funding to address emergency infrastructure relief which includes bridge repairs and emergency road construction.

1.4 - Emergency Bridge Repairs is hereby classified as bridges that have been identified as structurally deficient. Structurally deficient is hereby defined as bridges that have engineer identified flaws that include structure failure.

1.5 - If a bridge is identified to be structurally deficient, the Infrastructure Rainy Day Fund must cover 50% of cost for replacement for identified non priority routes and 100% of priority routes.

1.6 - Priority Routes are classified as roads or railroads that connect towns that have a combined population of 5,000 people or connect towns which have only the road in question as the only way in and out. Everything else will be classified as a non-priority route.

1.7 - The Assembly may adjust the amount of funding to non-priority roads in future legislation.

Article 2 - National Bridge Database

2.1 - The Ministry of Transportation will be required for the next 2 years to collect information about every bridge built in the country and inspect bridges that have not been inspected in over 5 years. The Assembly will pull aside 0.1% of GDP as startup funding.

2.2 - The Ministry of Transportation will be required to post that data for public use on a database.

2.2.1 - The National Bridge Database will contain the location of the bridges, the as-build plans for the bridge, all inspection reports of the bridge, and all incidents involving the bridge that may include fires, and collisions.

2.3 - The Ministry of Transportation must show on the database which bridges are considered structurally deficient according to the last inspection report.

2.4 - If a bridge is considered structurally deficient. The Ministry of Transport will prioritize money given to the Infrastructure Rainy Day Fund to rebuild the bridge.

Proposed by Joseph Fala, MGA