 In this episode of the Civil Engineering Podcast, we're going to talk to Peyton Gibson, Chair of the 2020 ASCE Colorado Infrastructure Report Card. What is the ASCE Report Card? Why is it important and how is it developed? Let's jump right in. Now, I'm excited to welcome our guest for today, Peyton Gibson. Peyton, welcome to the Civil Engineering Podcast. Thanks for having me, Anthony. So Peyton, you've done a lot of volunteer work and your work at ASCE and other avenues. And in fact, since we actually recorded this interview once before, we had a couple technical difficulties. And in the time lapse, you've had quite a bit of a kind of a change in your career transition. So before we dive into the ASCE Report Card or the Infrastructure Report Card, which we are going to dive into, let's talk about you for a minute. Tell us a little bit about what led you to make this career change. So a lot of it actually had to do with the ASCE Report Card. So I was working for the federal government out in Denver. I went to school in Denver. I love Colorado. But I got the chance to leave the Infrastructure Report Card. And I realized, I mean, I realized it quite a bit ago, but I was never, I never loved the technical side of engineering. I love the industry. But I really love what it stood for and the policy behind it. So I got involved with the Report Card. And I started looking at opportunities to kind of combine my love for the policy side of engineering and engineering. So I started looking at opportunities. And I found one in Washington, DC, which has been a really big change from Denver. So I decided to kind of just take a leap of faith and do a major career change for an engineer and come work for a nonprofit here in DC. Wow. So a career change and a geographic change moving of course from Colorado to DC, which is a big move. So talk a little bit about what you're doing now. So I work for the National Academies of the Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. I work with them on their board on infrastructure and the constructed environment. Basically, we're kind of like a consultant for the federal government. We were congressionally contracted in the 1800s by Abraham Lincoln to help the federal government with science, engineering and medical problems. So I help with studies kind of very similar to the Report Card. I help put together studies on all sorts of things really to infrastructure and construction. So right now I'm working on a study looking at the methodology behind how the Department of Energy puts together their energy efficiency standards. And we're also working with a group that's doing a study on how to make a business case for federal agencies to go to Congress and advocate for renewal in federal facilities. Wow. Sounds really interesting and it sounds certainly like something where you can have an impact on terms of infrastructure and we hear so much talk about infrastructure. And I think it's important for civil engineers to know that they can impact it beyond just like you said doing the technical design of it by getting involved in the policy side where things happen that maybe free up funding to make some of these projects actually happen. So that's great to know. So that being said, first of all, I really wish you the best of luck with it. I think it's a it's a it's very courageous, you know, making a career move like that and you know, relocating and I know you're doing it because you kind of love what you do and you want to get into the policy side of things. So let's talk about the the ASC Report Card. It's something that as civil engineers, I think we hear we do hear about. I mean, I think ASC has done some good work getting it out there in the national news outlets and things of that nature. But I don't think we know kind of all the mechanics behind it and you know how it actually comes to fruition. So let's start by just describing what the report card is and what it what is it its intent? Yeah, so the report card is a uniform. We like to start calling we've been calling it in Colorado a measuring stick of how our infrastructure is doing across the country. So a lot of people have seen the national report card. It makes a lot of big headlines. The report card gets a D plus. So it is kind of like taking your report card home to your parents and showing them how you're doing. It's really for us as engineers to use as a policy tool going to or if you have a state report card being able to go to your state capital or with the national report card being able to go to our national capital and stay to our policy makers, our legislators, hey, we're not doing well. We need to invest in this. We need to invest in the future. So basically, we just want a platform for civil engineers to talk about infrastructure, bring attention to how it's affecting us daily, even on an hourly basis. You know, we talk about in their report card how our roads impact our lives because, you know, we're not getting to work or it's taking us forever to get to work. We're not spending enough time with our families, power outages, that kind of thing. So in the Colorado report card, we had 14 different chapters of infrastructure from aviation to wastewater to energy and levies. A lot of people don't, when they think infrastructure, they automatically think roads and bridges, but it's so much more than that that connects everything. So I just want to just reset in terms of the report card. So the ASC report card in general offers a national grade, which you mentioned was what was it? D plus. D plus, and that was for 2019. That was 2017. They're going to be coming out with another one next year in 21. That's right. They come out with them every three years or four four years. Okay, so it gives a grade for the infrastructure of the US on a gray level, which I think is great, because like you said, if we're using it for policy, most people understand, you know, the A to F kind of grading system that we all had in school. So that makes a lot of sense. And now, you know, to get into what you kind of were just referring to in terms of Colorado, so in terms of how this report card, you know, actually gets put together, it gets done on a state by state basis. And that's how they come up with the overall, correct? So the national report card is more of just an overall general look of the country at the time. They don't really average the states together. Okay, it's are done. So the national report card is kind of an effort that's led more by staff on a national level. It is volunteers that put it together on a national level, but they are looking kind of broadly every four years of that. When it comes to the state level, we definitely dive a little bit more deeper into the statistics within our states. It's all volunteer led. So you really have to have a chair or someone who's really going to push the effort all the way through because we don't have quite as much staff involvement and leadership. So there are some states that don't have report cards. And then there's some states who haven't updated their report cards since, you know, 2013-2012, which, you know, is a long time ago and doesn't accurately reflect what we have right now. So in terms of the national level, it's not really an average of everything. It's more of a a broad look at the country at the time that's written. So similar to the states, they have their own kind of committee at the national level that looks into the different, I guess, landmarks across the U.S. and whatnot and comes up with the grading system. So all right, so let's get back to Colorado. So you served as the chair recently, is that correct? Yes. Okay. So it sounds like it's a pretty comprehensive process, especially for a volunteer led process, which is why, as you suggest, some states don't have them, some states haven't updated them in a while. So you mentioned 14 chapters. Is that 14 like different areas that you looked into? Take us through the process of how you came from looking at stuff to getting a grade. Yeah. So it was about a year long process. We first met at the beginning of 2019. We kind of put out a call to all the ASCE members and civil engineers in Colorado saying, hey, we need help with this. Got everyone together. Everything was by volunteers, after hours, after work, where everyone was engineers by trade, not policy advisors, not fiscal policy experts. So we all had full time jobs. And this was kind of a second job for a lot of us. So first of all, I like to mention that we don't go out and inspect all this infrastructure. So a lot of people assume that we're getting in our cars and going out to all the levies and dams and looking at and inspecting them, I guess. That's what I assumed. Yeah. I actually didn't know that going in as chair. I was like, gosh, this is going to be a lot of work. And I mean, it was still a ton of work. But what we do to put together the report card is use publicly available data. The first thing that we did after each person was assigned their individual chapter. So like I said, there's 14 different sectors of infrastructure we looked at, aviation, bridges, dams, levies, energy, like the best all of them for you, but I won't go on. But everyone was kind of assigned each chapter. We like to have like two or three people on each of them. And a lot of them worked within their chapter. We had all sorts of volunteers on this project, which was super awesome. We had some civil engineering students from Colorado School of Mines on the project. We had retirees. We had people mid-career, young professionals. And the first thing that they did after they were assigned their chapter was go out and talk to the agencies that were kind of in charge of this sector of infrastructure. So for example, roads, obviously, they go and talk to the Colorado Department of Transportation or the people who were writing the dams chapter go and talk to the Department of Water Resources in Colorado. So they go to their websites, get all the publicly available data, start reaching out to the agencies. And we're reaching out to the agencies, too, because not only do we want to like make sure that we have the right information and up-to-date information on the chapter, but we want to work with them and learning what they need, what they think that they need from in terms of infrastructure investment. You know, we're not grading these agencies. We're grading the infrastructure. So we want to work with them and make sure that they know that, you know, we're not giving CDOT and F. We're giving the roads because you guys have been working with what you have and doing the best with what you have, but it's still not doing well enough. Right. Right. So you're really focused on the condition of the roadways and things out there. It's not meant to be critical of the organizations maintaining those roadways. It's really, as you said earlier, it's really meant to be able to shine light on some of these issues and help in terms of policies and funding and things of that nature, which also, you know, listen, it's a tremendous amount of work. I mean, you know, if you were going to be doing some engineering design from this report, then obviously you might want to go out and do the inspections. But to me, it sounds like taking all the publicly available information for what we're trying to accomplish here is going to give you kind of more than enough information that you need to kind of, you know, make these grades quote unquote. But in terms of the process again, let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, I'm still kind of in shock in terms of the amount of work that gets done here by, you know, all these volunteers. So how does that work in terms of, I mean, you were the chair. So do you have like regular meetings together? Is it meetings with the different kind of chapters or segments? How did you work that? Yeah, it was tough because we had people from all over the state, Colorado is a big state. You have people who are up in Fort Collins down in Pueblo and you can't meet together in the same room regularly. I think we all only met each other twice throughout the effort. We had monthly calls leading up to our first draft. So just making sure everyone was able to find their available data, sharing stories about working with the agencies, just keeping everyone on track with those, with the drafting. And then after probably four or five months, we had our first very, very rough draft. We kind of assigned a few people to edit it and look at, you know, just basic editing. And then after we put together our first draft, we actually send it to ASCE staff. And they have a committee, a volunteer committee up on the national level that kind of goes through all of our chapters. Make sure that they're kind of written similarly to a lot of other states that were that were looking at things similarly, especially the grades. Yeah, I think in terms of communicating with, you know, a group of 30 plus people, it was just, you know, keeping up constant contact with them, even if we weren't on the phone or seeing each other often, like you do with your coworkers in the office, making sure you're sending out weekly updates and having those monthly conference calls, but having them be productive and quick and easy, because people are working on this outside of their work hours. This is a volunteer effort. So you don't want to take up too much of their time. What do you think motivated these volunteers? I think a lot of them worked within the chapter that they were writing. So, you know, we had a guy who had worked on pavement airports for 30 years working on his chapter. So he was obviously pretty passionate about that subject. But I think overall, too, that people recognize, especially Coloradans, our infrastructure is, I mean, our infrastructure grade went down from 2010 to 2020 from a C to a C minus. It's not something that people pay attention to in the news or that a lot of legislators pay attention to. And you know, I mean, a lot of people say, you know, it's civil engineer's livelihood. Of course, you guys are going to want to advocate for that. But infrastructure is so important. And I think civil engineers understand that, you know, it's what connects us on the on daily basis. It's what brings us our water. It's what we're able to throw our trash away. And it doesn't just go into the streets and civil engineers are really connected to that and really passionate about that. Yeah, it's a good point. It's something that I always think about in terms of being a civil engineer, both like through the conversations I have on the podcast and just thinking through some of the topics and issues is that it is kind of a little bit of a, I don't know what to call it, a conundrum. I mean, basically like a lot of times people will say, well, civil engineers want the funding because they want more work, right? They want to grow his work. But at the same time, like, you know, a lot of civil engineers that I know became civil engineers because they're passionate about the built environment. And they want, you know, passionate about keeping people safe. And so I think it always becomes a little bit of a back and forth point. But at the end of the day, we don't get the funding, you can't get the projects done, you can't make improvements to infrastructure and to the safety, safety for the public. So it's definitely all, all important. And, and I would imagine too that there are some great career benefits for people that volunteered on this committee, because, you know, like you said, a lot of them are working in the segments where they may have done the work, which I'm sure just helps them in terms of their technical jobs and professions and levels of expertise. And you know, and we always talk about the importance of kind of getting out there, giving back through associations. And also it helps you to build your kind of your technical expertise. And I'm sure has some benefits for the organizations they're working for. So all that being said, I know a lot of our listeners are, I know that there'll be some listeners from Colorado, but not everybody. But let's talk about Colorado for a minute, just to think about how you can take the report card, you know, and how it translates kind of back to what maybe engineers do in terms of their jobs. So you mentioned that Colorado, the grade was a C minus. So talk about what happens once you receive that grade now, and how, how you might utilize it, or, you know, the local civil engineers might utilize it to improve the infrastructure. What's the path look like for that? Yeah, so in terms of a C minus, a C minus kind of means that our infrastructure in Colorado is mediocre, and it requires tension. We have a lot of significant deficiencies, and a lot of vulnerability to risk. And nobody wants to live somewhere where the infrastructure is like that. I think one big thing to pay attention to too is that our infrastructure grade went down from the last time we graded it. So we went from a C to a C minus. In Colorado, a lot of that has to do with our population boom. I think we went from about, you know, we have 6 million people now. It's looking like there's going to be 8 million people in the next 20 years. We just had a huge increase in population in our infrastructure. It's just not able to hold it right now. A lot of it has to do with funding mechanisms. That's part of how we grade, put the grades on the chapters, is funding mechanisms, and how sustainable funding is. And we just aren't seeing that right now in Colorado. So in terms of what we hope for the report card to do, we're kind of, you know, we had our big press release a few weeks ago, made the news in a couple of spots. We had the governor sign a proclamation declaring January 30th, 2020 Colorado Public Infrastructure Day. We've been making sure that the report card is on the desks of all the state legislators. We've sent it to city councils. So we really don't want to let it just sit on the shelf and collect us. You know, we, as in the government affairs committee of Colorado ASCE have been tracking bills that are related to infrastructure. And we're just not seeing a lot. And it's kind of concerning because, like I said, we don't really have very robust funding mechanisms in Colorado for, I mean, all sorts of infrastructure, especially roads and transportation really, really lacks that infrastructure investment in that robust funding mechanism. So we are kind of hoping to take this on like a road show, making sure that the whole engineering community in Colorado is aware of their report card, what it's made of, what it means. But beyond that, we also really want to reach the public because Colorado is really unique in the way that we can't raise taxes without it going to a public statewide vote. So a lot of infrastructure investment means are in the voters' hands. So we definitely want this to get out to the public to tell them, hey, we know that taxes are not super fun, but we're really failing our infrastructure right now. And if we wait too long, we're going to see a big catastrophe instead of fixing it now. So I think that's kind of our next goal is to actually push legislators to maybe make some more bills on this and have it more in the front of their minds as well as getting it into the public. We actually put up a couple of billboards with a big Colorado infrastructure as a C minus. We can do better than this. So to get into the minds of everyone. Yes. And so that's kind of one of my last questions around this topic is you do all this work, you get a big group of volunteers. So there's a lot of work involved to lead a process like this to come up with the ultimate grade of a C minus. And it's kind of like, I can see engineers being really good at that, right? Doing all, going through all the steps, going through the processes working together and coming up with this goal of a C minus and getting it out there. But now it seems to me like for that C minus to be able to ultimately help in terms of funding for infrastructure and moving projects forward and improving infrastructure, you can need to go beyond the engineering side of it now and get into kind of like a marketing and policy side of things. And so, you know, that being said, does the national assist with that? Or how do you like you mentioned the billboard is that is money from that coming from Colorado? Or how do you get into some of these marketing efforts now? How do you have the funding and the resources for that? Yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of resources for it is sees a nonprofit. So we started off the really limited budget, you know, those billboards are only going to be up for a month. So we have to utilize them as much as we can. We do get quite a bit of help from the staff. They have been helping us kind of strategize what our next steps can be in terms of getting the report card out. It's been really fun pushing some of the engineers on our report card to go out and even just make presentations to their own companies, you know, doing a brown bag at lunch or doing like a local presentation to the students at like a engineering school for the report card. Yeah, the ASC staff has helped us a lot with getting in touch with the media, getting our story in the news and the local news. And they've been really helpful in training us on how to talk to media and how to spread our message most effectively. So it's really like, again, a grassroots marketing efforts, people got to get out there, they got to talk to their companies and do lunch and learns, they got to go out in the community and do what they can do. So the billboard funding itself, though, came from Colorado. Yeah. Yes. Well, great. All right. Well, listen, this is a very interesting process. You know, I appreciate you sharing your kind of insights and experience with it. And, you know, I commend you for kind of leading that volunteer effort, because, you know, I know when people, when people are working as a volunteer, sometimes it can be hard to stay motivated, although it sounds like you had a great group there in Colorado that was very active and very passionate about the built environment. So with that, what we're going to do now is we're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back and we're going to finish up by putting Peyton on the civil engineering hot seat and talk a little bit more about her career. I hope you are enjoying this episode of the Civil Engineering Podcast, which is produced by the Engineering Management Institute. Please be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here for more podcast episodes. And for all of our Engineering Manager, 8020 Shorts videos that we publish weekly where we interview successful engineering managers. Now it's time to jump into our civil engineering hot seat segment. All right, we're back with Peyton Gibson and Peyton gave us a real good look at the ASC report card, what it is and how it's developed both nationally and at the state level. And now Peyton, we're going to focus a little bit more on yourself and your own career and we're going to put you on the hot seat. Ready? Yep. All right. So first question, Peyton, are there any specific rituals that you practice every day? For example, do you have a specific morning routine or a lunchtime ritual, something that you do consistently on a daily basis that contributes to your success? I think staying healthy is one of the best things that we can do for ourselves. So I definitely try and get my steps in or my daily exercise dose. I think a lot of people have the Apple watch or the Fitbit now. So just meeting my daily goals in terms of exercise really keeps me energized and feeling good and on top of everything. That's great. Is there one book that you either would recommend to engineers or a book that you found to be helpful in your personal or professional development that stands out for you? Yeah, I love the book, Palaces for the People. It is about, it's kind of coming from a social perspective, but I think it's great for engineers because it really explains how exactly the built environment and infrastructure really connects us all and makes us a better community and can make a city a better place to live. Awesome. All right, Peyton, I want you to think back here. I'm sure you've had a series of managers in your career to date and, you know, not asking any name names, but if you think back at your managers and you think of maybe your favorite manager or, you know, one of your best managers, what made him or her your favorite manager? What were the characteristics or what were them about? What was it about them that you really liked that made them stick out for you? For me, my favorite manager, it always comes from flexibility and being really upfront when you're interviewing with a manager and talking to them about your goals and expectations when it comes to work. I really admire one of my managers who has a really great work-life balance, but he also gets everything done that he says he's going to. So I think work-life balance within a manager is what matters to me, what has really stuck out to me. So giving, being able to give some flexibility for people. Yeah, I'm just leading by example when it comes to work-life balance. That's great. That's awesome. Yeah, I know that that's an important thing that a lot of, I hear a lot of engineers talking about. All right, so I've got one final question here. We call it the civil engineering career elevator advice question. If you've gotten to an elevator with a civil engineer and you had about 30 to 40 seconds with him or her and you had to give career advice in that short period of time, Peyton, what would it be? I would say definitely don't let your career pigeonhole you or anything that you learned from other engineers pigeonhole you into a specific career track. I think a lot of engineers kind of have a one-set mind in what they can do with their degree in their career, but I think that there's a lot of opportunities out there and I'd love to see engineers, you know, all over different industries making a change because we all have really great engineering education backgrounds and I think that we can do a lot for the world. So not to constrain yourself and to go for those positions that you really would like to see yourself in. Awesome. Great advice. Yeah, sure. Don't feel constrained. There are so many opportunities out there as kind of Peyton has described for us here in her current transition how she now works for the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine on the Board of Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment. Peyton Gibson, thank you so much for spending some time with us on the Civil Engineering Podcast. Thanks for having me. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Civil Engineering Podcast on YouTube produced by the Engineering Management Institute. We're always looking for new ways to help engineers become effective managers and leaders. You can view all of our content on our website at engineeringmanagementinstitute.org and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here for our weekly videos. Until next time, please continue to engineer your own success.