April 2012

Craig Mongeau - April 2012

The Superintendent’s Profile office was honored recently with a visit from the Road Connection.

With stops all across the across the country at KPI-JCI and Astec Mobile Screens dealers, trade shows, and other events, the Road Connection is a nationwide nine-month road tour designed to raise awareness of the need for road and infrastructure funding. But the two-main Road Connection crew is not just stopping by trade publications, such as Superintendent’s Profile, and other industry organizations. After all, they’d be preaching to the choir. Andrew Gilman and Curt Peterka, the Road Connection crew, also will be pit stopping at malls and other locales where they can meet with the general public, who, after all, need to be much better educated about the difference in spending between government programs and actual re-investment in our country, which is what infrastructure funding is.

You know that many people only care about money for roads when they drive through a pothole or look at an antiquated bridge and wonder why it’s not being replaced. Well, it takes money and a government willing to spend it. There are two ways to pass down debt to our children. One is to borrow money for programs that do not act as an investment in our nation and consequently bequeath our children the bills later on. The other way is not to spend money on things (like passing on an inferior infrastructure system.) so that they deteriorate so badly that our children will be faced with no other alternative but to spend the money later that they may not have, either. Same principle applies at home. Creating debt to improve your home: good debt. Creating debt to eat out at a fancy restaurant: bad debt.

The Road Connection is working hard to try to rally the public behind infrastructure investment and to remind them that the transportation system is not dissimilar to the arteries in our body. Roads and bridges are the lifeblood of our country. I encourage you to visit www.theroadconnection.org to learn more about this vital endeavor.