Ever wonder why it's still Infrastructure Week? Peep this publication. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.exasperatedinfrastructures.com?utm_medium=podcast">www.exasperatedinfrastructures.com</a>
Exasperated Infrastructures Podcast
Claim This Podcastby sam sklar
6 episodes
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Ever wonder why it's still Infrastructure Week? Peep this publication. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.exasperatedinfrastructures.com?utm_medium=podcast">www.exasperatedinfrastructures.com</a>
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10/25/2024
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Recent Episodes
June 25, 2026
Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource
<p>All Roads Lead To The Sidewalk</p><p>Three takeaways for the lazy. Buy the book.</p><p>The sidewalk is the smallest unit of government we never talk about, and that’s exactly the point. </p><p>Michael’s whole career circles around understudied legal spaces, and the sidewalk might be the most understudied one of all. It’s this small thing with an absolutely outsized impact on our lives, and once you start looking at it, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere. That’s basically how this book happened: a <a target="_blank" href="https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol122/iss4/2/">law review article</a> wasn’t enough room to fit everything he found once he actually went out and traveled to look at how different states and municipalities handle the sidewalk.</p><p>Sidewalks don’t fail in isolation; they fail because of everything around them. </p><p>The Houston chapter is the one that really got me. Houston has decent, patchwork sidewalks, no real Euclidean zoning code, and almost nobody walks on them. Why? Zoning, parking minimums, and decades of underfunding and regulatory fights over the right of way matter just as much as the concrete itself. Whether you’ve got too much regulation or basically none, you can still end up with a place that isn’t walkable. It’s a bell curve, there’s a sweet spot, and most places aren’t anywhere near it.</p><p>There’s another crazy Houston land use fact that shouldn’t surprise you or me, hidden in the book (and in the interview). You’ll be gobsmacked. </p><p>Right now, we {often] hand sidewalk responsibility to private property owners, and that’s a historical accident, not a real policy choice. </p><p>We don’t ask people to plow their stretch of the car-oriented street, but we do ask them to shovel and fix their stretch of sidewalk. That’s one reason why wealthier neighborhoods have decent sidewalks nobody uses, and undernourished neighborhoods have a patchwork of bad sidewalks everyone depends on. </p><p>A Department of Sidewalks idea isn’t about more bureaucracy; it’s about consolidating the mess of agencies that already touch the sidewalk into one accountable one. All roads lead to the sidewalk; whatever your built-environment policy obsession is, there’s a sidewalk angle to it.</p><p><p>Exasperated Infrastructures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Exasperated Infrastructures at <a href="https://www.exasperatedinfrastructures.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.exasperatedinfrastructures.com/subscribe</a>
May 28, 2026
Pitchfest 2026: Civic Tech in Action
<p>I sat down with Cara Eckholm, a multi-hyphenate founder and civic tech/engagement specialist, to talk about Pitchfest—a project of PilotCity and the third iteration of a matching program between NYC city agencies and interested university researchers, supported by foundations and non-profit funders. It’s not complicated, but it is essential given how challenging it is to administer the needs of a $120 billion+ budget each year. </p><p>I attended the afternoon sessions related to the built environment, where the packed house listened to dozens of one-minute pitches. Principal Investigators, university professors who are allowed to fundraise, sat with me and listened to research proposals they’d like to work on, supported by philanthropy. </p><p><p>If you are qualified to support proposals, please make sure to submit an interest form here: </p></p><p>I’ve linked to the full deck below (Substack doesn’t allow me to embed a PDF!)</p><p>The ones you care about start on Slide 86, but I really recommend skimming through the whole deck to learn about agencies and city-led initiatives doing the public’s work that you definitely haven’t ever heard of. </p><p><p>Exasperated Infrastructures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Civic tech is an exasperated field.</p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Exasperated Infrastructures at <a href="https://www.exasperatedinfrastructures.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.exasperatedinfrastructures.com/subscribe</a>
May 20, 2026
Peck, Michigan is the gold standard for project reform.
<p>Below is a modified transcript of the conversation above. </p><p>Peck, Michigan is easy to miss. It’s a village of about 570 people in the thumb of the state — blink and you’ll drive right through. But over the last few years, Peck has quietly become a model for how small rural communities can punch well above their weight when it comes to securing and deploying public infrastructure money. They’ve secured roughly four million dollars in grants, completed a solar project that cut their electric bill by $140 a month, replaced aging water mains, and are now looking at extending their water system to support new housing. I sat down with Tim Heiden, Peck’s Village Manager, to talk through how they did it — and what other communities can learn from the approach.</p><p>The conversation was brought together with the help of Danielle Capers, who connected me with the project. <a target="_blank" href="https://partnersforpublicgood.org">Partners for Public Good</a> — led on this work by Dr. Karl Hoesch — has been working with Peck on structuring and communicating their procurement process, and that partnership is a big part of what makes this story worth telling. Together, they were able to successfully apply for, win, secure Federal funding, and procure a qualified contractor to carry out the work. This is how change starts.</p><p>Right now, Peck, MI, is the gold standard for procurement reform across the entire United States.</p><p>The Project</p><p>Sam Sklar: Can you give a quick overview of what the project is and where it came from?</p><p>Tim Heiden: In 2023, I applied for a Congressional Spending Program grant through <a target="_blank" href="https://mcclain.house.gov">Rep. Lisa McClain’s office (MI-09)</a>. The original grant amount was $762,000, with a total project cost of just about a million — we had to come up with a $176,000 match. We’d already secured a couple of other grants, but we were finding it tough to get bids. We’d only get one or two, so the pricing wasn’t great. The project involves replacing some older, smaller water mains for about two and a half blocks in the village and then extending our water system another two and a half blocks so we can support some new housing development and run water services out to one of our parks.</p><p>SS: And so what I’m hearing is this was an EPA grant, used to replace and extend water mains — but that the really interesting part of the story is how you rethought procurement. Where did that start?</p><p>TH: When I got the EPA grant, I got a cold email from somebody at Partners for Public Good. It piqued my interest, so I reached out, and we sat down and talked. It made me realize that we’d been relying on the old way of doing things — we had an engineering firm post bids on BidNet and the statewide procurement sites. Some local contractors didn’t even look at those unless I called them directly. And honestly, I didn’t have a lot of contact information, because the village hadn’t had a manager before 2022, when they hired me. For years, things were run by a council that met once a month. There hadn’t been any major infrastructure projects done in probably fifteen years or more.</p><p>How Tim Got Here</p><p>SS: Was the hesitancy in the past because the town felt like it didn’t have the internal capacity to manage a grant this large? Why 2022?</p><p>TH: In 2018, a council member approached me about filling a vacant seat. I was hesitant — I was busy doing other things — but they pestered me for about two months, and I finally said yes. Once I got talking with our DPW supervisor, we realized there was a lot of deferred infrastructure work. I started looking into grants, and the village sent me to a two-day online grant writing course. We wrote a few smaller grants, got those, and figured: why not go after some bigger ones?</p><p>At the time, I was a corrections officer working a swing shift, so I was in the village office fairly often. After a couple of years, council decided they needed a full-time manager. I was going through some medical issues that were going to force me to retire from the sheriff’s department, so I threw my hat in the ring. Since then, we just keep a list of projects and go after grants as they come up. We’ve secured about four million dollars so far.</p><p>SS: Four million dollars for a population of 570! That’s punching way above your weight. And I think it’s genuinely inspiring for other communities around the country that might feel hesitant to approach state or federal grant programs with that level of enthusiasm. Too often, what we see is a game of telephone — the local community has a problem, doesn’t know who to talk to, the state doesn’t know how to talk to the federal government about what the program should look like to fund communities, and nothing gets built. What Peck has done breaks that cycle.</p><p>Rethinking Procurement</p><p>SS: Walk me through how the bid was structured differently this time. What changed?</p><p>TH: One of the biggest things we did, working with Karl and his team at Partners for Public Good, was build out a contractor list from scratch — water, sewer, roads, sidewalk, all of it — with actual contact information. We sent a survey out to close to fifty contractors. That alone gave us useful feedback on why some of them hadn’t been bidding on Peck projects. A lot of it came down to timeline. In the past, you’d post a bid and they’d want it done in three months. That turned people off.</p><p><p>I sat down with council and said, “If you want to not get reelected, that’s one way to do it.” </p></p><p>The other thing was, instead of just posting the bid and hoping somebody saw it on BidNet, I was able to email the bid packet directly to contractors with a note explaining the project — where the funding was coming from, that the money was already secured, and how to reach the engineering firm for the drawings. That last part matters more than people think. Contractors want to know that the grant is locked in before they spend time putting a bid together. Sending a personal email that says, “I have an EPA grant, here’s the amount, here’s our plan,” is a completely different experience than a posting on a procurement board.</p><p>It was more personalization than the standard ‘here it is, hope somebody saw it.’</p><p>SS: This is what I’d call stakeholder mapping — actually understanding the environment you’re working in, rather than hoping the right people happen to be watching the right procurement websites. The two big takeaways I’m hearing: one, be proactive and do targeted outreach to firms. These grants still have to be competitive — you can’t sole-source this kind of work — but as long as your outreach is broad enough to capture the firms that can realistically do the work, you’re already doing it better than most. And it’s not an expensive process. A week or so to compile names and contact information and do the outreach. The payoff is a more competitive bid, better pricing, and you start building actual relationships with contractors in your region.</p><p>The second takeaway is cost savings that get passed directly to residents. What’s your perspective on that side of it?</p><p>TH: Absolutely. I live in the village I manage. When we raise utility rates, it affects me too. I tell our residents all the time — it affects the council. I don’t take raising rates lightly. The problem is that Peck, like a lot of Michigan municipalities, went years without raising rates on a consistent basis, and now the newer generation is paying for that. Michigan Rural Water came out last year and recommended roughly a $45 increase between water and sewer. I sat down with council and said, “If you want to not get reelected, that’s one way to do it.” We compromised at $20 last year, with the plan to do the other $20 this year. But with the economy being what it is, we were able to complete this project without touching any of the funds we’d put away — so we could go another year without that increase and then reassess.</p><p>SS: That’s the point I keep coming back to with this project. What the government can do here is unleash other operations. Every dollar spent well today is another dollar that can go toward a more expensive project later — and the cost of doing nothing compounds too, because inflation affects what your savings can actually buy. Residents care about this even if they’re not in the weeds on water main replacement. What they can grasp is that they’re saving several hundred dollars a year because of a government investment. That’s money being reinvested in the community. The circular economy argument. And I think where a lot of projects miss the mark is they don’t communicate these benefits clearly. Peck, with the help of Partners for Public Good, is doing exactly that. That’s what got me interested in the first place — good spending, good communications, and the people it’s actually affecting.</p><p>Lessons Learned and What Surprised Them</p><p>SS: What surprised you during the process? What came up unexpectedly that changed how you engaged with partners and stakeholders?</p><p>TH: A lot of it was just making contact with contractors. Peck hadn’t done any major utility work in a long time, so we’re not on anyone’s radar. Some of the local managers around me and some of our commissioners used to say, for years, Peck did nothing. And now we’ve completed a solar panel project at the community center that reduced our electric bill by about $140 a month. We’re looking at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/comm_planning/cdbg">CDBG funds</a> through the Michigan Housing Development Authority to extend sewer to eight new housing units — units the developer doesn’t have to pay to connect. If we get another eight units on the same system after that, we spread the cost of the infrastructure across that many more customers without raising rates.</p><p>The biggest thing was the feedback from contractors who said they’d seen Peck bids before but figured they never got selected, so they stopped looking. By reaching out personally and walking them through what we’d actually built over the last few years, I think that changed their calculus.</p><p>SS: Peck is one of hundreds of towns in Michigan and thousands of towns around the country where people genuinely care about their community. You’re underselling it a little — it’s a beautiful part of the thumb, and I’m sure it’s a great place to raise a family. I think there are a lot of places like this that feel either locked into bad process, bad procedure, or just not as proactive as you and your team have been.</p><p>If you had to give the first piece of advice to a town manager anywhere in the country, what’s the first thing they should do?</p><p>TH: Pick up the phone. When you’re in a small town run by a council, you don’t always know who the right contacts are. I just started calling local managers and picking their brains. My council has been supportive of me going to conferences — I just spent two days at a housing conference in Lansing. I always bring back information, and we sit down and figure out what’s relevant for Peck.</p><p>We are the model for Sanilac County right now — I won’t pretend otherwise. The larger communities around me have been watching to see how things pan out in Peck. When they do, they call me and ask for the documents. I have no problem sharing. If the community ten miles away thrives, mine will too, one way or another.</p><p>But really — make those contacts first. Reach out to your state rep and your state senator. That was the very first thing I did. I called and asked to sit down and talk. One of those conversations led to a $200,000 grant for playground equipment. Just by having a conversation with my local economic development director.</p><p>SS: It sounds so easy. And I think it is something that almost anyone in a community can do — even if you’re not the village supervisor. You could volunteer your time, approach your local leadership, and say: here’s what I can do to help. The Peck model isn’t a complicated formula. It’s great leadership, a good opportunity, and clear communication working together. And of course, there’s some alchemy here — Tim, you’re a genuine champion for this place, and every project needs one. But there’s no reason every community can’t find its own champion.</p><p>On the Broken System — and What Michigan Is Trying to Fix</p><p>TH: The first conversation I had with my state rep and state senator, I told them: the system is broken. When it comes to grants, it’s the same communities getting them over and over. Larger communities can afford to pay a grant writer. Smaller ones can’t. There wasn’t even a single place to find grants until recently. The state of Michigan now has something called <a target="_blank" href="https://mifundinghub.org">MI Funding Hub</a>, which consolidates all the state grants in one place by department. You type in your project type, and it pulls up relevant grants. They’re following what the federal government has been trying to do with grants.gov. But they still have to do a better job getting that information out — because smaller communities don’t always send someone to a conference to hear about it.</p><p><p>That’s what got me interested in the first place — good spending, good communications, and the people it’s actually affecting.</p></p><p>I’m arguing right now with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.michigan.gov/mshda">MSHDA</a> about the way they’re handling a grant I applied for. They changed the rules between rounds — they used to allow both the municipality and the developer to apply for the same project together. In my town, I don’t have multi-million dollar developers. I’ve got a local businessman who sees that we need housing and is willing to help build it. We wrote the grant together, and then they changed the rules. I’m pushing the director to change it back because the way it’s written right now hurts small rural communities.</p><p>SS: That’s the game of telephone in reverse — the state making rules that make sense in the abstract and then creating real friction for the communities they’re supposed to be helping. The fact that you’re the one pushing back on that, on the record, is part of what makes this story valuable.</p><p>On the Future of Water in Peck</p><p>SS: Last question. Water in Michigan has been a topic of interest for decades. How is Peck’s system currently run, and what does the future look like?</p><p>TH: It’s run by the village. We have a resident who holds his water and sewer license — he’s our water and sewer operator and our DPW superintendent. We have three wells and a 180,000-gallon water tower. I’ve looked at what’s happened when other communities hand their water or sewer operations over to an outside operator, and I’d rather keep it local. My guy cares about this system more than someone who lives two towns over and shows up when something breaks. We like to keep it local.</p><p>SS: There’s a lot of attention on privatization right now, and I’m always curious when I talk to people running smaller systems what their actual take is. It depends on finances, it depends on the ecosystem, it depends on who you’ve got. I’m glad Peck has their answer. I’m really grateful for your time today, Tim. My goal with this conversation is to give you a mouthpiece to reach communities across the country and share what Peck has built. There are a lot of great takeaways here.</p><p>TH: Awesome. I appreciate the invite.</p><p>Three Takeaways</p><p>1. Stakeholder mapping is the cheapest infrastructure investment you can make</p><p>Peck didn’t just post their bid and hope. They built a contractor list from scratch, sent a survey to close to fifty firms, gathered feedback on why contractors had stopped bidding, and followed up with a personal email that explained the project and confirmed the funding was already secured. The whole process probably took a week or two. The payoff was a more competitive bid, better pricing, and the beginning of real relationships with contractors who now know Peck is a serious client. There are hundreds of communities around the country that could do this tomorrow. Most aren’t.</p><p>2. Smart grant spending is rate relief — and it compounds</p><p>Peck completed a major water main project without drawing down their reserves. That means they could hold off on a planned utility rate increase for another year. For residents in a small rural village, that’s several hundred dollars back in their pockets. The circular economy logic here is straightforward: every federal or state dollar that gets spent well locally is a dollar that doesn’t have to come from ratepayers, and the savings create room to fund the next project. The problem — and Peck is doing something about this — is that most communities never communicate this clearly to the people it affects. Partners for Public Good is part of the reason Peck can tell this story.</p><p>3. Pick up the phone</p><p>Tim Heiden’s first move, every time, is a phone call. He called his state rep and state senator. He called local managers to pick their brains. He called contractors who hadn’t bid on Peck projects in years. One conversation with an economic development director turned into a $200,000 playground grant. This sounds almost too simple — but the thing that holds most small communities back isn’t a lack of money or a lack of eligible projects. It’s not having a champion who treats outreach as part of the job. Peck has that champion. Other towns need to find theirs.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Exasperated Infrastructures at <a href="https://www.exasperatedinfrastructures.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.exasperatedinfrastructures.com/subscribe</a>
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