Reporting and expensing infrastructure has been optional under current governmental accounting practices. Reporting and accounting for other capital assets, such as land, buildings and equipment is already required in the current model. Statement 34 allows state and local governments to use a modified approach for allocating the costs of infrastructure to operations. This approach focuses on the costs required to maintain specific service levels and allows readers to evaluate whether the government is meeting its goals for maintaining infrastructure. It will require a coordinated effort between the financial management and the public works staff to develop the annual reporting.
Roads are important financial commitments.
DLG does not believe that you will have to hire engineers to conduct a massive inventory of your infrastructure. You won't need to hire more staff to count these assets. Questions in the attached survey will help us design implementation assistance that will not cost you a lot of money. We understand that your budgets are already too tight to add any additional costs. We are trying to identify state resources that are already in place so that you will not be adding any unnecessary costs to your budgets.