The ideas have trickled all the way up to the top. The White House's own master plan for construction reform mimics public management reforms in Great Britain, calling for greater private sector involvement and using incentives and partnering rather than top-down public management of projects. The plan explicitly aims for savings of roughly 50 percent in time and expense. Goals that were long thought unachievable are now routinely targeted. For the states, the new federal rules mean both greater funding and greater responsibility to build high quality projects with long-term viability.
Many states are already on the move.
All have achieved notable benefits by streamlining their procurement and delivery systems. Massachusetts and a handful of other states have taken little or no action, resulting in lower quality construction and overruns calculated in years and millions of dollars. Ultimately, caps on capital spending are impacted negatively, fewer projects are built, and fewer people are employed in the construction industry. They have raised the right questions about the effects of our Byzantine regulations that are based on the concept of low-bid, with no consideration of best value. The rigid low-bid requirement has choked off innovation in public management and the construction process, where it obstructs flexibility and foments confusion and redundancy at the job site.