Join the Ecobot team as they talk with environmental experts about their work and how they’re influencing the environmental industry.
Cameron - 00:00:06:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Ecobite podcast, where we will be diving into topics around the environmental industry. Join me, Cameron Davis, and Ecobot's product manager and seasoned environmental scientist Liv Haney, in a deeper conversation with our guest. If you'd like more context to our conversation and or a crash course on the topic at hand, please view the Ecobite video recording before getting started. Either way, enjoy.
Cameron - 00:00:40:
Hey, everybody, this is the Ecobite podcast. We have Sunny Fleming here from Esri. We'll be having a conversation about her presentation on the infrastructure bill. My name is Cameron Davis. I am the marketing associate here at Ecobite, and I have my co-host. Go ahead, Liv.
Liv - 00:01:01:
My name is Liv Haney, and I'm the product manager at Ecobite.
Cameron - 00:01:06:
Cool. And, of course, we have Sunny Fleming. Hi, Sunny.
Sunny - 00:01:09:
Hey, thank you for having me on.
Cameron - 00:01:12:
So we just saw your presentation, and we'd love to talk to you more about it.
Sunny - 00:01:17:
Yeah, sounds good. It's a very exciting thing. That infrastructure bill.
Cameron - 00:01:22:
It finally passed. Well, I guess we're in, like, a period where it's passed. It's a thing. What sort of timeline before we start to see actual actions taking place? Like, when is that pothole at the end of my road going to be filled? When is the highway not going to have construction on it? Or maybe even more construction?
Sunny - 00:01:46:
That's a fair question. A fair question. So a lot of the programs in that are five to seven year programs. So the funding from any of these programs is authorized over the next five to seven years. So buckle up. I would say, though, that through the grapevine industry, various industries were already preparing for its passage. And so I really think that a lot of construction that you even see right now was probably in preparation for this infrastructure bill and funding through it. A lot of the programs in that bill are existing programs. So it's not like they didn't have funding or they didn't have these opportunities. They've really just been hyper funded. So, yeah, it'll be a fun time coming up,
Cameron - 00:02:30:
You had talked about the early 30. Was all this done before that became like a sound bite? Or was it like, oh, this is starting to happen, and it's within the next seven years. That's about 30 or 2030. So was the cart before the horse, I guess, in that instance?
Sunny - 00:02:54:
That's a great question. And I'm not on the Hill, I can't speak for the White House, but the impression I've gotten is that the infrastructure bill really understands, and I mentioned this in the sound bite, that it's a master class in messaging. And really what I think it does is understand and recognizes and now speaks to holistically the fact that our environmental systems, our economic systems, and our social systems are all interactive and interdependent. They're not separate. So a lot of bills that we see speak to one of those things. They speak to economics. They speak to environment or they speak to social. This one does all three things and I think that's brilliant. So when it comes to things like 30 by 30, which is a global initiative.
Cameron - 00:03:52:
Sorry, I was in the ESPN documentary 30 for 30 is not 30.
Sunny - 00:03:59:
30 by 30. Yeah. 30% of our land, air and water by 2030 to conserve. So that was this global initiative. But I think what's so brilliant about the infrastructure bill as well as the Inflation Reduction Act and we even see some of this already in the ARPA funding that came from COVID is kind of a preparation to achieve some really lofty goals, both from an environmental perspective as well as an economic perspective and a social perspective. So I think these things kind of happened in parallel. There's definitely a relationship between these things. And if I had to read the tea leaves, I think what everyone is being tasked with, regardless of what perspective they're coming from, is to really innovate how they conduct their business. Innovate how do we tackle protecting our most biodiverse places through a lens of economics, through a lens of social equity. How do we tackle economic growth and the modernization of our infrastructure with environmental sensitivity and equity? So there's a lot of overlap here. So I think it's all happening kind of together and at once.
Cameron - 00:05:16:
Yeah, everything's got to be viewed through the lens of capitalism. Even as we're trying to be more environmentally conscious. It seems like there has to be some sort of dollar initiative to make it happen.
Liv - 00:05:31:
Sunny, can you elaborate on the ARPA funding for those that don't know?
Sunny - 00:05:36:
Yeah. So the ARPA funding is the American Rescue Plan Act. And that funding was an emergency funding through federal funding during COVID. So there was a lot of interesting line items in that bill. So a good example is related to and this is coming from that economic perspective, but it was able to be used in some cases by state park agencies for things like capital improvement projects or all sorts of interesting stuff. And what that intent was with that particular line item, there was quite a few in there, but the intent for that one was to spur economic activity around different kinds of tourism activities. During COVID a lot of people realized that their pastimes of going to a movie theater or going to the mall or going to these enclosed indoor spaces wasn't an option for them. And so we saw a lot of people returning to the outdoors to recreate. And that funding that came through ARPA was then legitimately eligible for those kinds of improvements to our outdoor spaces, which I thought was really interesting and creative use for that funding.
Cameron - 00:07:02:
I want to go back for a second because you actually got a phone call from the White House. I'm like, how did this happen? How did they get your phone number? Did it show up on your caller ID, like, White House.
Sunny - 00:07:16:
White House. Oh, man, I wish.
Cameron - 00:07:17:
Really interested to know how that goes down.
Sunny - 00:07:20:
Yeah. When they make my autobiography.
Cameron - 00:07:25:
In the works,
Sunny - 00:07:26
Because I'll be self funding it. Yeah. No, I would like to imagine that in the future, if there's a biography about me. There won't be. I'm not that interesting that it will show up as the White House on my caller ID That's not how it happened. So what happened was, like, so many things that go viral, and I'm using that term relatively, this is LinkedIn viral. LinkedIn viral is much less sexy than Twitter viral, TikTok viral, Instagram viral, YouTube viral. So I posted about the infrastructure bill, a picture of my print out. I'll start from here, actually. So, okay. I asked my boss at the time, can I print out the infrastructure bill?
Cameron - 00:08:13:
Already a financial budget line item.
Sunny - 00:08:17:
Exactly. And he just laughed and said, no, read it online. And I'm like, man, this thing's over 1000 pages. I already have terrible eyesight. I can't read this online. So I went ahead and I printed it out on my own. For those who are interested in doing the same, it is $150 at Kinkos. Make sure you do it in black and white. Yeah, so I read it, put a bunch of notes in there, and then I posted a picture of this on LinkedIn, and it got like 18,000 views or interactions. I don't know how it's measured. And one of the people that viewed it, to my knowledge, is Denice Ross. She is the Chief Information Officer for the White House, I believe. Denice, I apologize if that's not entirely accurate. And she had some contacts already inside Esri with our Chief Scientist, Don Wright. So she reached out to Don Wright, as well as another colleague of mine, Pat Cummins, who's amazing, she works with our governors and said, I really want to pick this girl's brain about this infrastructure bill. So, yeah, they did an email introduction, and then Denice and I had a chat about the infrastructure bill, and she asked me some really interesting questions at the time, and that's a lot of information to digest. And so I had some early gut reactions to it, and I think our conversation centered on that more but since that conversation, my understanding and my relationship with that bill has definitely matured and changed and evolved. So it was interesting call.
Cameron - 00:09:57:
Sunny, making waves all the way to the White House.
Sunny - 00:10:02:
My father was very excited. He thinks I'm practically the President now but that is unfortunately not true.
Cameron - 00:10:09:
I was reading an article you posted on LinkedIn about your optimism for the future and people questioning why you're so optimistic. And I thought it was really cool because it talks about how we're in this politically fraught situation, yet we're still able to find common ground, be it the economics of moving these initiatives forward. I think from an outside perspective when we were watching the Capitol Hill kind of discuss this program and how it went from being the biggest social program since the 1930s under MDR to really getting reined back in as an investment in our infrastructure. Do you have any insight into what was removed and what the future could have looked like if that had been like the whole package? Maybe this is too much to tackle.
Sunny - 00:11:14:
No, I think it's a great question. I think I'll speak to this more from a perspective of how I understand it in its existing form, but also how I was personally raised to negotiate. My father was always teaching me these little tips and tricks on how to barter and how to negotiate. And his father, my grandfather was in politics. He did work on the Hill and so I think there's always in my family has been some politically adjacent interests and I've always been fascinated by politics. And so the way I understand it is that to do a good negotiation, you always shoot for more than what you expect and then you kind of work backwards from there, right? And you kind of land somewhere in the middle. So if I had to guess, I'm sure there's details and things that were lost that someone is probably sorely hurt about. But I think what we landed on with this infrastructure bill is still pretty amazing from the perspective of really having more inclusive and stronger language around equity and environment in particular, as well as this understanding that in order to achieve some really progressive goals. And I don't necessarily use that term politically, but more from an American standpoint, in order for us to continue moving forward. I think it's achieved some big things in this. I think people, if I had to guess, are really happy with where it kind of settled to. They negotiated back and they landed where they probably intended to land.
Liv - 00:13:01:
That's awesome, Sunny. That provides a lot of hope in my mind as well for the ability to compromise and negotiate and establish something that is best for the good of the majority, if not all people. You talked a little bit about different sort of buckets that you work in and how the IJAH affects each of those buckets. I really want to kind of Zoom in on the environmental regulation bucket and does the bill suggest any potential improvements for streamlining the regulation process? I know that's been I mean, I've seen on LinkedIn and just with posts coming out from the EPA and other environmental regulating agencies that there's a push to standardize and modernize the permitting process and sort of all of the communication around that. Does the bill suggest any way to do this or do you have any opinion on this or is it sort of up to each organization to figure it out for themselves?
Sunny - 00:14:11:
That's an excellent question. So with the infrastructure bill, there is some language that alludes to streamlining the environmental review process, but it's actually in the Inflation Reduction Act, which is mostly tax incentives. But there's portions of that bill where you find very direct language around improving the environmental review process. So what the bills do are direct funding to this initiative. They establish a permanent office and a budget for the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Committee. And they work in conjunction with the Center for Environmental Quality CEQ. These are two federal programs, and fipsy in particular is a very new office. And they didn't really have a budget. Well, the Inflation Reduction Act now gives them a budget to do what they need to do. Now, how they achieve this streamlining then becomes their decision. So they have the funding to do it, but they are then entrusted with the ability to actually make decisions on how that happens. And what you'll find in addition to that in the Inflation Reduction Act are funding for things like transportation and this is at the federal level to improve those permitting processes. And then, and I find this very interesting, but it's still kind of an unknown on how it's going to work. There's a line item in the Inflation Reduction Act. I used to have the section number memorized. I don't right now, but it authorizes funding for state and I believe local governments to look at, modernizing their processes as well. Now, how that funding actually gets disseminated, I don't know yet. I don't think that's been decided yet. But I thought it was very interesting that that line item is there. And I think that's something that the State agencies in particular that I work with, I really want them to be looking at and tracking because this is, to my knowledge, kind of setting a precedent to provide funding to modernize that. And a lot of times when you look at what is eligible under a particular program, so that means what can you spend your money on and what can't you spend your money on? This says tools. So tools is technology. But also when you're looking at programs, and if it says that a requirement for the funding is to do data driven decision making or to be more equitable or to et cetera, et cetera, well, technology helps us do that. And so if people are looking for funding for GIS, they're really not going to find it. And that's the wrong way to search for funding in these bills. The right way is to think about what is the challenge that this particular line item is trying to tackle and how do we justify applying technology to that? And that's where you're going to find the opportunity to modernize your business processes.
Cameron - 00:17:42:
So I want to jump in because I'm sort of the nincompoop of this conversation, and I think about the Army Corps APT Tool. We did a webinar on it and people were so excited to see how it worked because when you pull it up on your desktop, it looks like it's an Atari game, that it's like really weird and really archaic. But the information, if you're able to understand it and utilize it, the information it provides is so robust. And I think people just had this they knew it was out there but they didn't know how to use it. And it just became like oh, that's how you use it. But I think there's nothing really sexy about it in private industry. Maybe that's more you want to be more aesthetically pleasing. But I think about the Rivets to how that website just feels like it's untenable because it's very old looking. So the infrastructure, we're talking about roads, we're talking about waterways, but like the technological, technological infrastructure of our government is like running on Windows 95. Meet me in the AIM chat room to talk about political policy. What do you think is going to incentivize our government to really have a robust change in our technology infrastructure? Or is it all mostly driven by government contracts in those businesses innovating in technology? Or do you think it would actually come from the government itself?
Liv - 00:19:29:
How do we get the private sector's sort of attention to detail into the federal systems that can be made available to all size companies?
Sunny - 00:19:39:
Yeah, that's an excellent question. And Liv, I think you just kind of started alluding to it as well with private industry. So within this infrastructure bill, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act, there is more language and more emphasis and encouragement to bring private industry into the fold on private public partnerships and to really lean into each other's strengths. And precisely because when it comes to if we take government in a silo, it is very difficult for them to be agile many times, whereas private industry has a lot more freedom. But when it comes to things like procurement, it gets very complicated. But from an incentive standpoint, whether it's government or whether it's private industry, there is always market demand and that stands true no matter what. And so I think there is more demand by the public for more accessibility, more transparency and the government is beginning to respond to that. And so I think they are really putting an effort into trying to improve these systems from an interface perspective, but also from how do we provide the public with transparency without compromising the sensitivity of data. That's a very difficult balance to achieve. But they're trying. And I think a really good example from the federal government that we've seen is resilience.climate.gov. I believe that's the link. If it's not, it's climate.resilience.gov. We'll have to check on that and what that does. So they worked with Esri on this or Esri worked with the federal government on this. And when you go to that site, it's not a NOAH site, it's not an EPA site. It's branded in such a way that it doesn't say that it's any one particular agency. And it provides communities with a very slick location based interface because for us, maps are very intuitive. So if we go map first, already we are crossing language barriers because we're using location as our point of transparency and accessibility. So right there, using a map provides us with a little more equity immediately. And the tools that are found on that site allow local governments to plan, do resilience planning and look at climate change and how is that going to impact their economy, what are the hazards that they need to kind of keep an eye out for? What are those material risk? That's a very private industry term right now. But that's really looking at what's the risk to our GDP, to our economy that our local community provides? What's the risk from climate change? And so that tool is a very good example of the direction that I think governments are starting to head and moving away from some of these archaic interfaces. So I'm still optimistic, I'm still hopeful there as well.
Liv - 00:23:08:
I came from working in the private consulting sector and there's definitely struggles with, from a permitting perspective of navigating relationships with your local government, your state government, the federal government, and abiding by all of those regulations. But ultimately the goal is the same for all of these different regulations that are put in place by these agencies in the concept of wetlands, there's protections in place and it's a lot of times overcomplicating the same goal at all of these different levels. But I think the same thing applies to something like this resilience climate tool that you're seeing data that's necessary at all levels really of local, state and federal. And how can we make sure that we're getting the needs of local communities and states communicated to the federal level and sort of back down? It's such a never ending problem, I feel like, of being able to unite the goal in a common and streamlined way. I would hope that some of the improvements in messaging and improvements in communication that the IIJA sort of references or alludes to includes like cross industry communication or cross, I guess, level of communication. And I wonder just what your opinions are on seeing that type of improvement.
Sunny - 00:24:53:
It's interesting you're touching on this upstream, downstream movement of information and something that I talk about a lot when I'm talking about Esri and the power of Esri's technology and location based and the power of spatial technologies. One component that we just touched on was that using a map provides this kind of instant equity and transparency. But also that the way in the cloud, in particular, what the cloud has allowed us to do, and I mean us as in everyone, not just Esri, you know, we are able to connect and integrate systems more easily than ever. And every state owns Esri technology, the federal government owns Esri technology. Many local governments almost all the counties, they all own this technology. Our federal tribes have access to this technology. Nonprofits have access to the same technology. And my pulpit has always kind of been, look, we all have access to the same platform. It was designed to integrate and communicate as a system of systems. And we can really start leveraging that and start reaching out across these different geographic levels to help move data in a way that is much more streamlined. So when it comes to something like a wetland permitting process, you're going to have your Army Corps of Engineers regulations, you're going to have probably state government regulations. There's going to be local communities that have some kind of stakeholder input into this as well, and possibly their own regulations. So how can we leverage a system of systems and location based technology to improve and streamline this? It's within our reach. The technology is absolutely there. That discussion has to happen across our industry now, and I think it's starting to. So I was recently at the National Association of Environmental Professionals Conference, where we presented on this hypothetical utopia of the system of systems across government, private industry, nonprofit. And the first question, and this was asked by a representative at Arizona, DEQ. She was brilliant. She goes, that's great, but how is this going to happen? We have to all agree to this. And I'm like, yes, we do. And that has to start with a discussion. And that discussion, hasn't it's been happening? Everyone's kind of griping about it, but we have a solution, so let's start getting excited about that solution and implementing it. And that's where I think that discussion comes in. And from a data standpoint, when we're thinking about this from a technology standpoint, one of the first steps is coming to an agreement on a consistent standard, and then everyone's going to have their own details. But what is that minimum viable data standard or standard for the things and the characteristics that we want to collect about this? And then we can really innovate pretty quickly, I think. But that's going to have to come from the industry. And that's the kind of discussion I hope our industry starts having.
Liv - 00:28:32:
So as a fellow cartophile or a lover of cartography, I was wondering if you could tell me what your favorite data set is in Esri's library.
Sunny - 00:28:48:
That's a tough one. My favorite data set is, you know, it's funny. I really like, I'm going to be general with this. My favorite data sets are actually point based data sets because I feel like I can do a lot with those. I can summarize them. I can turn them into rasters. Doing stuff with elevation and population and visualizing those in different ways have created some of the most interesting maps I've seen from our community. But Esri's Living Atlas, if you browse that, I think it's one of, if not the largest repository of spatial information that we partner with the federal government, global governments. It's just full of data that is endless to explore and experiment with.
Liv - 00:29:45:
I think that was a cop out, but thank you.
Cameron - 00:29:49:
If you could only see the guinea faces of these map nerds. Um, thanks, everybody, for joining us. The Ecobite podcast. I've been Cameron Davis.
Liv - 00:30:07:
I'm Liv Haney.
Sunny - 00:30:09:
And I'm Sunny Fleming. Thank you for having me.
Cameron - 00:30:12:
All right, we'll catch you next time. Bye.