InfrastructureUSA.org is a non-profit, online community whose mission is to bring together infrastructure experts, industry leaders, government officials and most especially interested citizens, to participate in vigorous conversation and generate action to address the U.S. infrastructure crisis.

InfrastructureUSA recently spoke with Governor Edward Rendell of Pennsylvania, about the urgent need for civic engagement on infrastructure. Governor Rendell, along with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, founded Building America’s Future, “a bipartisan coalition of elected officials dedicated to bringing about a new era of U.S. investment in infrastructure.”

Excerpts from that conversation:

“The infrastructure challenge comes at a very difficult time in our nation’s history, because the economy is flattened, because there’s been so much federal investment in the bailout of the financial institutions, the bailout of the mortgage institutions, because we built up significant debt, I think all necessary to turn the economy around. For infrastructure to come knocking on the door, saying we need to invest and the only way to do it is to build up significant debt and invest it in something valuable that has long — those long term assets — that’s a hard sell. It’s a hard sell in the Congress and it’s a hard sell with the President who’s taken on a number of enormously broad and ambitious challenges. And the only way I think we have a chance to make that sell successful is not to convince Washington first, but we have to convince hometown America first. We have to get the people involved in the dialogue, get them to understand and to buy into the need for infrastructure revitalization in this country, and let their representatives know that we’re with you on this one…”