Across the nation, thousands of pork producers typically have, in their state or very near by, a facility they can transport their animals to for processing, an obviously key link in a chain that ends with customers selecting product from their grocery shelves or a restaurant patron ordering from the menu.

The industry, as large as it is, isn’t without its gaps, but the market has its way of identifying those and, as supply and demand economics kick in, adjusting along the way.

Sometimes, however, it takes more than a few years to make those adjustments.

Such was the case when Thorn Apple Valley Farms closed a key facility in Michigan, resulting in producers having to truck their hogs to facilities in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, adding time and dollars to the literal food chain.

It wasn’t until 2013 that producers, armed with a $100,000 state of Michigan grant, were able to do something about this particular gap, identified as such by Gov. Rick Snyder in his first State of the State speech a year earlier.

The money was to be used to explore the feasibility of a production facility in the state and one of the people the producers reached out to was Doug Clemens, CEO of Clemens Food Group, a Pennsylvania-based family owned business that producers in Michigan had dealt with in the past.

Clemens, a fourth generation member of the family, is telling the story from a construction trailer in Coldwater, Mich., on the site of a 450-acre, $255-million facility that will process some 10,000 pigs in a single shift when it opens in mid-2017.

“We were passively looking at expanding,” says Clemens, recalling those first discussions. “At the same time, we had relationships with some of the producers from about 25 years ago, so they were familiar to us and they knew us as well, which is why we were initially approached.”

Some 800 people will earn wages starting at about $14 an hour for production jobs, with higher paying $20-$30 per hour wages for technical and trades positions, but that number would double should Clemens decide to spend another $30 to $40 million on putting in a second shift.

How it came about
This is certainly a complex story, and not just because of the plant itself, the first greenfield project the company has undertaken since it was founded in 1895 by John C. Clemens, a Mennonite farmer whose Pleasant Valley Packing Co. was based in Mainland, Pa.

When that plant burned down in 1946, the family, unable to secure steel to rebuild since war rations were still in effect, negotiated with the owners of Hatfield Quality Meats in nearby Hatfield, Pa., where Clemens Food Group remains today, employing 2,200 in an operation that includes raising and slaughtering hogs, as well marketing under several brands.

Doug Clemens, who spends about half his time hopping back and forth from Pennsylvania to Coldwater (the company just bought its own plane to shorten what would otherwise be a 10-hour one-way trip by car or commercial carrier), continues the back story of how the plant came to be.

Discussions with farmers eventually morphed into an arrangement involving an equity investment in the company, the first time anyone other than a family member has become an owner.

“It’s way more than a supplier relationship,” says Doug Clemens. “There’s a co-dependency with us and we both recognize that we are interested in sustaining the business in a way that cascades from generation to generation. We’ve been very deliberate in maintaining and building those relationships.”

The company was also somewhat picky in who it invited to participate, a careful widening of a relationship that had its genesis in various transactions conducted years ago and after reputations were earned.

“The original group had come to us and they had done their research on us,” said Dan Groff, Clemens’ director of Ag Business Development, who has been with the company since earning degrees from Messiah College and St. Joseph’s University.

For Doug Clemens, plans to become a veterinarian eventually shifted instead to animal science and his graduation from West Virginia University. Rather  than working somewhere else (now a requirement of family members wanting to be in the business) he answered the call of his father, now 86, who wanted to know when he was going to be coming back to work.

Clemens did just that, working in livestock procurement for 15 years, then managing the company’s fresh pork operations and later business development and the firm’s research and development operations.

Then one day, the company’s president, who was also his cousin, told him he was going to be vice president of Strategic Planning.

“Neither one of us knew what strategic planning really meant, but we knew that we needed it, so I sunk my teeth into that,” says Clemens.

Part of that included having discussions with people like John L. Ward, clinical professor of Family Enterprise at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and the establishment in 2000 of what is being called a “trust triangle” that includes the company’s board of directors, management and family.

“Each of those groups has its own responsibilities and that’s how the business is structured,” says Clemens, who was elected to the board of the Clemens Family Corp. in 2014.

Being able to tap into the expertise that is represented on the board of directors (all of whom, other than Doug Clemens and a son-in-law, are outside the family) was seen to be critical to the success of the Coldwater project.

“We were adamant about seeking opinions from people on the board who had done things like this before,” says Clemens. “And we weren’t just putting up a building, we were building a market.”

That plays out in the fact that even today, months before product is shipped from the Coldwater plant, Hatfield-branded product is being sold in area stores.

But it’s the relationships with the state’s pork producers—the farmers, many of them family businesses—that have become a central strength of the Clemens Food Group and its operations.

Part of that is recognizing the alignment of interests that exists, something that has found its way into discussions with producers, says Groff, who is responsible for negotiating contracts with area farmers.

“We have an interest in hog production ourselves so we understand the needs of the producer and our agreements reflect that,” adds Groff, referring to the 55,000 sows Clemens has in its operations, about half of what is needed for the Hatfield operation. That translates into just under 1 million pigs a year.

For Coldwater, about 90 percent of the pigs needed for the first shift have already been secured, with the balance to come from spot buys and future agreements.

The argument for aligning with a coordinated operation like Clemens also comes in the form of a value equation, with an established brand in the market and the benefit of producers being able to see more value derived from their hogs.

“If we were just to sell fresh pork, the margins are slim,” says Groff.

One of the members of the group Clemens has partnered with is Fred Walcott of Valley View Pork, based in Allendale, Mich.

“With only a limited amount of processing in the state of Michigan and good [hog-raising] operations of substantial size, a lot of the hogs have been going to processing plants in Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois,” says Walcott. “It became obvious it was time for Michigan to take a serious look at the possibility of keeping those hogs right here.”

Eventually, what had started out as a “go on their own” proposition for producers became the partnership Doug Clemens has described, albeit without any disclosure of specifics. “It was a minimum investment,” he says. “But they have skin in the game along with their commitment for supply. That’s what really makes it work.”

State, region are invested
From a government participation standpoint, the Michigan Strategic Fund provided $12.5 million in Community Block Grant funds for infrastructure improvements, land acquisition, workforce development and on-the-job training for the plant.

“This decision by the Clemens family only underscores that Michigan’s food and agriculture sector is ripe for innovative business opportunity, economic development, and new jobs. It’s a growing industry and we’re excited to have a pork processing plant back in the Great Lakes State,” said Jamie Clover Adams, director of the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. “The project further highlights the commitment and partnership by local and state officials, economic development groups and private industry to bring new companies and investment into Michigan.”

A package totaling some $55 million includes nearly $16 million in tax savings that have come in the form of personal property tax reforms.

Paul Beckhusen, president of the Economic Growth Alliance for Branch County (where Coldwater is located), said the addition of the company to the community “exemplifies our vision and illustrates the positive direction in which we continue to lead. This project has been a template of success for state, regional, local and private partnerships—all working together to attract an ideal corporate citizen like the Clemens Food Group.”

Clearly, things like location of highways was critical to the decision to pick Coldwater, located on I-69 and near I-80 and I-94.

While the formal relationship with producer families and Clemens wasn’t facilitated by the state, there was what Doug Clemens calls an unprecedented level of cooperation between the state, county and city when it came to making the project a reality.

“I’ve never seen that kind of cooperation before,” he said. “People usually have their own agenda, but in this case, they had one agenda and that was to make it work for us. We’ve been extremely happy to work with all levels of government on this project. They were very proactive.”

Lisa Miller, who until June 2016 was executive director of the Branch County Economic Growth Alliance, called the Clemens move “a home run for us.”

Up until now, the largest local private employers have been a Wal-Mart distribution center with 1,000 workers and Asama Coldwater Manufacturing, which employs 400 in the making of brakes for Honda vehicles.

Clearly, things are progressing well as far as construction is concerned, as well as the myriad of details that will take place before the first product is shipped the day after Labor Day.

Included in that long list are the hiring and training of workers (some are now being trained at the facility in Pennsylvania). About a year ago, Earnie Meily, the company’s human resources manager in Hatfield, relocated to Coldwater, where he continues to develop local relationships, including those with Kellogg Community College, where specialized training programs will provide the workers needed on an ongoing basis by the company.

Clemens expects Gray Construction, the contractor that is building the facility, to hand over the keys on May 1, with a ribbon cutting ceremony to take place on July 29.

But getting most of the facility’s 640,000 square feet fully refrigerated is a process that will take weeks if not months to accomplish. It will also take time to gradually ramp up production to the 10,000 head of pork a one-shift operation will handle.

Even then, a significant portion of what is produced in Coldwater will find its way back to the east coast, where the Hatfield name, the signature brand along with several other specialty labels, is marketed.

Environmental impact
In any project of this size, environmental considerations come well ahead of any shovel in the ground.

At Clemens, that task befalls William Fink, the company’s environmental management specialist, who turned to Fishbeck, Thompson, Carr & Huber Inc., a consulting company that includes environmental work in its portfolio, to manage the approvals at the local and state level.

Focused on everything from mitigating things like soil erosion that might be impacted during construction, to managing storm water—typically rain that falls on buildings and elsewhere—officials sifted through how Clemens intended to proceed with the project.

Permitting for the facility included a detailed analysis of every aspect of the operation, including the projected emissions resulting from natural gas boilers.

Perhaps surprisingly, very little of the hogs is discarded, with everything from the meat to what some might think of as waste being converted into product that is sold—even if that includes fertilizer sold to farm operations.

In the end, attention to resources like water—in the case of Clemens’ operation, much of it reclaimed, cleaned and reused—is included in the environmental permitting process.

“We’ll have a facility where process water, including that used to clean trailers, is treated before ultimately being discharged to the city of Coldwater,” said Fink, who added that minimizing the amount of waste is central to the company’s strategy. “Our plans are to recycle as much as possible.”

In its application to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, Clemens’ consultants pointed to the design of the state-of-the-art facility as one that was “subject to the same high levels of cleanliness as the meat packaging industry, greatly reducing the potential for odors.”

Family and business
At Clemens Food Group there are some 300 family shareholders out of a total of 700 family members, with the seventh generation just recently born. Primarily, members of the fourth and fifth generation are managing the company.

Getting along with the family is something, says Doug Clemens, that came from the deliberate decision to separate family from business.

“If you were to be interviewing one of my nephews, he would tell you if he wasn’t performing in the job, I would be the first to be at his house, consoling him on the loss of his job.”

Clemens, as part of his earlier strategic planning role, became determined not to see the family business fall prey to a sobering statistic: that 97 percent of family enterprises cease to exist after the third generation. “We made that a conscious decision and we’re adamant that the responsibility to continue is for generations to come. Stewardship is one of our core values.”

The company, with roots in the Mennonite faith, also adopted a value of generosity, with 10 percent of pre-tax profits going to charity.

And while Clemens himself has worked nowhere other than the business, he has at least one child who will work somewhere else to get the “outside” experience before taking on a management role.

“We do strongly recommend that family members work elsewhere for about five years,” says Clemens. “It’s a matter of having the diversity of experience, which we think is important.”

It’s that season again.

People across the United States, at least those who live in regions where there’s some “traditional” sense of weather distinction, experience four seasons—spring, summer, fall and winter.

But when it comes to auto buyers—and more particularly the 16,680 franchised new car and truck dealers belonging to the National Automobile Dealers Association—we’re now in “auto show” season, a time when millions get ready to do their pre-dealership shopping.

From September (in Miami and Oklahoma City, where millions of Oklahoma State Fair visitors see cars as part of a show integrated within the grounds) right through April, when the New York International Auto Show takes place, people in every region of the nation have their calendar dates circled as the time when they head to whatever regional show they’ve made a tradition of attending.

The vast majority are typically three, perhaps four days in length, from Friday through Sunday, organized either directly by the area’s dealership group or contracted out to a production company, one being Motor Trend Auto Shows, the subsidiary of the magazine publisher, which runs nearly two dozen events.

In the Midwest, it’s the North American International Auto Show, arguably the “big daddy” of productions and the only one that’s sanctioned on a yearly basis by the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (OICA), which is headquartered in Paris.

The NAIAS—more colloquially referred to as the “Detroit auto show” (although from a branding purpose, the former is preferred, often pronounced “n-EYE-as”)—comes around right about now, with Preview Week just wrapped up and the public show starting Saturday, January 14 and running through Sunday, January 22, 2017.

But the show, which takes over a completely renovated Cobo Center adjacent to the Detroit River, is really a show in at least three-parts, only one of which will be attended by more than 800,000 paying customers. There were 815,000 in 2016, the highest number since a peak of 838,000 attending in 2003.

The first of those three parts is Press Days, which began with press conferences on Sunday, January 8 (a highlight being John Lasseter, chief creative director of Disney/Pixar, unveiling a full size—apparently drivable—“Lightning McQueen” from the upcoming Cars 3 movie).

An estimated 5,000 accredited media from the U.S. and 60 different countries, according to NAIAS officials, attended more than 40 press conferences, events typically held at the space rented by manufacturers for the public show and lasting enough time for the key messages about features and “design cues” to be conveyed to reporters and photographers ready to spread the word to their audience.
On the heels of Press Days are another two days where members of the auto industry poke and prod their way through vehicles. Here it’s not unusual to see engineers, calipers and tape measures in hand, on their knees taking stock of what their competitors plan to bring to dealerships in the weeks or months ahead.

This year, another event, AutoMobili-D, occupied the Atrium area of Cobo Center and a significant part of the lower level of Cobo, with displays from a wide selection of companies and organizations intent on reshaping the future of transportation.

“The way the world views mobility is being reshaped and redefined right here in Michigan,” said Rod Alberts, executive director of both the NAIAS and the Detroit Auto Dealers Association. “There’s unparalleled research, design, testing and infrastructure development happening right in our backyard. When coupled with the global stage NAIAS provides, this creates the ideal venue for both established companies and tech startups alike to showcase their technologies and future products to an unrivaled concentration of industry peers and international media.”

Next year’s version will almost certainly be bigger than this inaugural year, with potential exhibitors who had held back likely clamoring to be involved and show organizers having some 30,000 additional square feet of space available to accommodate the demand.

For the majority—the estimated 50 percent or more of the public who tell researchers they intend to buy or lease in the next year—it’s the show dates that are of the most interest.

This year heavily emphasizes the introduction of electrified or hybrid electric plug-in models, along with ultra-luxurious brands like Lincoln, which has physically distanced itself from its Ford parent exhibit space.

Consumers will be taking note of the increased connection features a vehicle has to offer, with GM, as one example, inviting visitors to plug in their own iPhone or other smartphone device to an entertainment system to see for themselves how things could play out.

Whether it’s the Detroit show a prospective buyer attends or any of the other regional shows running through April, one thing is certain: dealers are counting on a subsequent surge at their showrooms, especially after production topped 17 million vehicles in 2016.

With less than two weeks before America’s 45^th president takes office, those who listened to Donald J. Trump’s argument about the need for infrastructure renewal may find our series of articles on the issue even more interesting than when they were first published.

The need for a more national, integrated approach to dealing with the movement of electricity was one of the predictions made in the first story in the series. That article featured ITC, a company spun off from DTE Energy to handle the utility’s formerly integrated high-voltage transmission operation. ITC Michigan CEO Linda Blair told us about the company’s success (it has since been acquired by Fortis, a Canadian company) in building new connections, notably the network that will harness wind energy being generated in Michigan’s Thumb.

The entire story can be found here as well as the story below.

In the second story of the four-story series we focused on an issue that’s arguably even more important than the movement of electricity, but not always as visible.

While “Pushing Pipe – Infrastructure across the U.S. is in ‘dire need’ of replenishment” referenced the Flint water crisis, it also took a big picture perspective in focusing on what is, after all, a nationwide issue – the underground infrastructure that provides water and more to us all.

In the third part of our series, writer Beth McKenna looked at the issue of wind energy from an infrastructure standpoint, especially the role progress in the industry can play in driving economic growth, sating in part a growing appetite for this renewable form of energy. Her story can be seen here.

We wrapped up our series by taking a look at what may arguably be one of the most pressing of infrastructure challenges facing Americans today and in the years ahead.

Roads are certainly important—think back to the impact the building of the Interstate Highway System continues to have on interstate commerce—but bridges typically can’t be the subject of detours. They work or they don’t.

Yet even then, engineers, legislators and those who make it their job to navigate the lines between massive need and the niceties of budgetary restraint, look for ways to satisfy both. That story is found here.

Corp! writers and editors will continue to tackle issues of importance, like that concerning infrastructure as we did in this series.

Will President Trump find a way to push forward? Like everyone else with a front-row seat, we will be taking note.

When it comes to discussions about infrastructure, the underlying “stuff” that society often takes for granted, possibly the result of its ubiquitous role in facilitating just about everything we do on a daily basis, it’s not long before bridges become part of the conversation.

Nationwide, every state has hundreds if not thousands of these structures, many of them built decades ago and to standards that were seen as “state of the industry” at the time, but now, not so much.

Even with the pressure that comes from a perennial funding gap, the issue isn’t necessarily something that should greatly alarm the public.

“We have safe bridges in America,” says Adam Mateo, a bridge engineer with the Virginia Department of Transportation whose job includes dealing with an aging inventory of structures, many of them approaching or past their 50-year design life expectancy.

Mateo says that structures designed for 50 years may need to be kept functional for 100 years or more, perhaps even as long as 150 years.

Mateo stresses that his optimism is not without foundation.

“We know the bridges are safe, primarily because we have a national bridge inspection standard that is rigorous and we don’t let them get unsafe,” he says.

What is required, and jurisdictions like Virginia and elsewhere have largely adopted this approach, is a change of tactics that has shifted to more preservation work, extending the life of a bridge, while at the same time implementing new design changes that will make tomorrow’s bridges last even longer than they do today.

“We’re lucky in that we understand what makes bridges deteriorate,” says Mateo. “It’s salt, water and heavy trucks, with the dominant factors being salt and water. What happens is the steel members of the bridge corrode, concrete pops off and girders rust.”

Even better than knowing what makes a bridge deteriorate is the fact that Mateo and his colleagues nationwide know what to do about it.Added to the wealth of data that engineers tasked with the job of keeping bridges in a safe condition for use by the motoring public… is one stark fact: A good many of the bridges that were designed and built to last a half century have either passed that mark or are getting close to doing so.

In Michigan the bridge infrastructure issue may be typical of the rest of the country in that there is never enough money to complete all the maintenance work that “should” be done.

That said, officials like Kirk Steudle, director of the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), say the situation is not nearly as ominous as one might begin to think, especially in light of perennial funding challenges that are likely to persist.

One justification for a positive frame of mind is that Steudle and his staff at MDOT, the people who are ultimately responsible for bridge inspections and maintenance, have and continue to prioritize their work in favor of bridges, even over roadways.

And for good reason.

Priority shifts to bridges

“Bridges have to stay open,” says Steudle, a construction engineer by training who joined MDOT in 1987 and became its director in 2006. “And in the last round of funding, we made those a priority, putting one of every four cents into bridge maintenance.”

That doesn’t mean life for a bridge engineer in the state is a perfect one. “Some are pretty bad,” Steudle admits. “But we have a five-year plan to get to a better place.”

In Michigan and elsewhere, the focus when it comes to bridge maintenance is taking an asset management approach to the problem, identifying bridges that require strategic fixes that would extend the life of the structure, especially before a bridge gets to the point where it has to be replaced.

Indeed, Steudle says preserving and prolonging the life of a bridge is nearly always a preferred choice, especially in the early life of a structure.

But even then, common sense comes into play. “If we have a bridge where the piers have about 25 years of life left, we’re not going to want to put on a 100-year bridge deck. What we want to do is match strategic investments, doing the right repair at the right time, which is what our definition of strategic investments means.”

Fix damage done by salt and water
Their strategy starts by spending money to fix damage that has been done over time by salt and water, creating a patch with materials and techniques that are intrinsically better than what was used in the past.

But money is also dedicated to work that will stop the leaking in the first place with the use of better expansion joints, which is the source of the water damage.

That shift in thinking is, Mateo says, not necessarily reflexive in a nation that’s traditionally geared to “replacement” rather than fixing something.

“We have this culture that thinks this way,” he says. “As bridge engineers, we like designing and building new things. The preservation and repair and rehabilitation is a more challenging way of looking at things, but that’s where we are right now.”

What is an underlying constant in this new type of thinking is the “now is better” approach to maximizing the impact of a repair strategy.

“On the good bridges, things like washing them to remove the salt that is contributing to the corrosion, recoating the ends and waterproofing the membranes are all things that help extend the life,” says Mateo.

So does applying thin deck overlays, cleaning culverts and removing large debris in bridge deck channels, all designed to extend the life of a structure.

Another factor that comes into play when a bridge gets to the point where it does require a full replacement is to take what Mateo says is a lifecycle approach to the type of materials and techniques that are likely to add significant years to the structure’s life expectancy—perhaps 80 to 100 percent more years—but with a minimal extra cost.

An example might be a new bridge without an expansion joint but with stainless steel reinforcement and the use of concrete that doesn’t absorb water as much as what was used in an earlier design. It’s a little more money but the result is a bridge that will last a lot longer.

In Virginia, experts like Mateo say the rehabilitation and preservation of bridges can be done for about 15-20 percent of typical replacement costs, a significant return on investment, especially for something that has to be done if the wheels of commerce are to continue turning.

There is, however, an important point to make when it comes to bridge repair, one that Mateo says deserves attention.

“It’s important that we don’t pursue a ‘worst first’ approach,” he says. That means emphasizing preventive maintenance and taking a balanced spending approach.

“If we limit what we do to bridges that are in the worst condition, we won’t be able to extend the life of bridges,” he adds. “There has to be a balance here.”

Another stated priority is to tackle projects that have the largest impact to commerce and the public.

Report card shows some improvement
Andrew Herrmann, a now-retired bridge engineer who spent his entire career with Hardesty & Hanover, a Boston-based company that specializes in bridge work, was president of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2012 and chairman of the committee that wrote the ASCE’s 2009 Report Card on Infrastructure.

Four years later, the 2013 version of the ASCE’s report had bumped up its 2009 “C” grade to “C+” while urging federal, state, and local governments to increase bridge infrastructure investments by $8 billion annually to address what its authors say is an identified $76 billion in needs for deficient bridges across the U.S.

Herrmann, who clearly has stayed current with an industry he has worked in all his adult life, says one of the problems inherent in funding for keeping an existing bridge functioning beyond its projected life is the lack of attention it delivers.

“There’s no ribbon cutting involved,” he says. “That could be part of it and politicians typically are in too short a cycle to be looking too far into the future.”

At the same time, he agrees with others in that there are better materials, including high performance steel and concrete, with which to build bridges that will last longer than their predecessor structures.

“Building a bridge with better materials and better design will be cheaper in the long run,” says Herrmann.

Bridge engineers are also putting science to work in coming up with better ways of inspecting the thousands of bridges that continue to serve Americans, one of the most iconic being Michigan’s Mackinac Bridge, which connects the state’s lower and upper peninsulas.

Dr. Nizar Laznef, associate professor of civil engineering at Michigan State University, is co-developer (with professor Shantanu Chakrabartty of Washington University in St. Louis), of a sensor that could help bridge operators do an even better job of keeping tabs on the condition of the structures.

Several of the prototype sensors are to be installed on the Mackinac Bridge as part of a demonstration project. The key benefit is the fact that the sensors operate on energy produced by the vibration of vehicles, which means they require little if any maintenance while delivering massive amounts of data that engineers will be able to use to keep the structure in tip-top shape.

In Georgia, the state’s Department of Transportation has partnered with Georgia Tech Research Institute to create robotic technology that will automatically detect and repair damaged roads.

The “Roadbot” device, which is fully automated and requires only a single operator, boasts a detection accuracy of 83 percent, giving states the potential to save significant amounts of money by taking a preemptive approach toward road maintenance. By preventing larger damage, the Roadbot could allow states to focus their resources on other projects.

Another example of technology at work comes in the form of a multifunctional bridge deck assessment tool that’s being developed in cooperation with the Federal Highway Administration’s Long-term Bridge Performance program. The organization is using a robot-assisted, remote controlled device—RABIT—to collect high-quality 360-degree images around a bridge deck. Sensors also use ground penetrating radar to “map” reinforced steel and other metallic objects below the surface and GPS sensors to mark the location of the data collected.

The device also uses impact echo and ultrasonic surface waves to evaluate the condition of concrete and the strength of the bridge’s deck, wirelessly transmitting the data collected to a computer for further analysis.

Drones tested to improve efficiency
In Michigan and elsewhere, officials have embarked on a two-year study that began last spring into the use of drones for inspecting bridges, a follow up to work done in Minnesota.

Investigation on the use of drones is also being conducted in Massachusetts, where a group is looking at the pros and cons, including any potential threats, to their possible use surveying construction projects.

In all, some 33 states have been involved in studies of the technology or helped with policy discussions and research.

In Michigan, a 2014 study was done by transportation officials in partnership with the Michigan Tech Research Institute, with findings suggesting that the use of drones could help in assessment of bridge decks as well as monitoring traffic.

The first study determined that drones are safe, reliable, less expensive and help keep workers out of harm’s way, Steven Cook, a Michigan Department of Transportation engineer, was quoted as saying.

“A traditional bridge inspection, for example, typically involves setting up work zones, detouring traffic and using heavy equipment,” Cook said. “(Drones) can get in and get out quickly.”

With cost estimates of a bridge deck inspection at $4,600 and a drone inspection (two people taking two hours) coming in at about $250, the returns are potentially impressive.

Ron Brenke, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers, is familiar with the issues, although that doesn’t mean he has to be happy about what the profession he represents has to deal with on an ongoing basis.

And while he understands the need to keep bridges open, he says the practice of putting temporary supports on bridges is a troubling sight. “All we’re doing is kicking the can down the road,” says Brenke.

Money at the heart of the solution
At the heart of any sustainable solution is a formula for funding that will allow for the replacement, rehabilitation or preservation of bridges in the long-term.

“It is the funding,” says Brenke. “I know people are tired of hearing it but there’s really no other culprit. Our state officials are very involved in asset management and they have a good handle on the condition of every bridge. It’s not that we aren’t doing things the right way, it’s that we don’t have the money to do all that’s needed.”

A significant boost in funding that takes effect Jan. 1, 2017, will go some ways toward helping the cause, for roads as well as bridges.

In a document titled “Economic Impact of Transportation Investment,” MDOT says an investment of another $1.3 billion (a number higher than what’s actually been approved) would support 14,000 jobs annually, increasing personal income by $1.9 billion in two years and by $11.6 billion over 10 years.

It would also, according to MDOT figures, increase gross state product by $3.3 billion in two years and by $25 billion over 10 years.

Under the measures, a series of new road funding laws will raise taxes by $600 million a year, with an eventual reprioritization of another $600 million in state spending, a $1.2 billion a year boost in spending for roads and bridges.

The initiative is said to be the state’s largest transportation funding increase in more than 50 years, although it has faced criticism by those concerned with its potential effect on other areas of government investment.

As of Jan. 1 next year, gas taxes shoot up 7.3 cents a gallon, with diesel going up 11.3 cents. Five years later, in 2022, fuel taxes will be indexed to inflation.

Michigan’s current gas tax, 19 cents a gallon, is below the national average but higher than others because the state sales tax is applied to fuel.

That said, Michigan’s gas tax is set to be 13th highest in the nation, based on figures from the American Petroleum Institute.

The funding legislation also includes a 20 percent increase in registration fees for cars and commercial trucks.

On the actual short-term impact on construction, the legislation has included an extra $400 million, but it’s a one-time appropriation not likely to be repeated. What does kick in is an extra $50 million in revenue from higher fuel tax and registration fees, with a fully phased in, dedicated funding level of $600 million in 2018, $760 million in 2019, $944 million in 2020 and $1.23 billion in 2021, according to the House Fiscal Agency, a non-partisan body.

But there’s still a gap, an annual $800 million shortfall that experts say is ultimately needed.

Which may mean that the strategies and innovations engineers and others are doing throughout the U.S. will have to continue, at least for the foreseeable future.

Editor’s note: This is the fourth and final article in a series looking at Michigan’s infrastructure and the individuals and businesses that play a part in it.