Infrastructure is more than buildings

By Richard Rychtarik, Las Vegas

Friday, Oct. 30, 2015 | 2 a.m.

What is infrastructure? Congress and the president talk about it a lot. Most would agree it’s items such as roads and bridges. We hear from our elected officials about the need to provide better maintenance.

By definition, infrastructure is the physical and organizational structures and facilities sush as buildings, roads and power services required by an entity in order to operate.

What, then, is the infrastructure of America? Where does it begin and end? Perhaps it never ends and is tied together in an integrated endless loop. Break the loop and irreparably harm the entire structure.

Neither our food sources nor we can live but a few days without water, so water and its supports systems must be one part of our infrastructure. We all know that without electricity America would not be a fun place to live, and much of our water is delivered to our homes and farms via devices that require electricity. This is yet another part of the basic infrastructure ecosystem. What about data, information about us and everything we need to support our daily lives? Without this we would not be able to manufacture or buy goods and services. So we need water to drink and grow food, electricity to deliver water and data/information to design, build and purchase goods and services. The Internet and our health and education systems are part of our infrastructure also.

When our elected officials and those running for office talk about funding infrastructure and then devolve into discussions about what to do about the gasoline tax, shouldn’t we be asking bigger questions? How do you propose to sustain our infrastructure as a whole, not just one element that by itself is not a long-term solution to our well-being? Sound bites don’t address the problem of how America will evolve in the future. This is why we need more leaders with vision and not division. Think long and hard about your next choice for president. It could be the most important choice you’ll ever make.