The power of an emergency

An interview in the NY Times tell us something very interesting:

And you mentioned that Governor Shapiro was able to relax and pause a bunch of rules. What he was able to do was declare a state of emergency. There had been a tanker with more than 8,000 gallons of fuel. It overturned. It set on fire. And then the bridge above it collapsed.

And in declaring that state of emergency, the normal procurement rules, the normal contracting rules, the normal going out for comment rules, the normal ways you might sue or have to do environmental review, all of that got swept away. So Mike Carroll told me that he got the call that this had happened. He makes his way to the bridge as fast as he can.

And not far from him are two contractors who are already doing work in that area. And basically, by the day’s end, he has chosen these two contractors to manage the demolition and the rebuild. And he could only do that because all of this got waived.

I said, how long would that have normally taken you? And he said to me that the normal way — and here, I’m quoting him — so in a traditional delivery of a project, it would be months. We’d hire a consultant to design it. We’d need final design approved by the Federal Highway Administration. Then there would be bidding from interested contractors. Then we’d process the bids. Then we’d issue a contract.

So that would be 12 to 24 months. And he said, that is probably an underestimate because you’d have to do a bunch of things before you got to that point in the process to even get the process off of the ground. It’s not like they threw everything out the door. They used union labor to rebuild this. They had union labor going 24 hours a day, which would not normally be allowed. But again, under the emergency rules, it was allowed.

So normally it would take two years just to issue a contract, and here the bridge got fixed in 12 days!

Lessons for NZ here.

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