In March 2025 the American Society of Civil Engineers gave American infrastructure a C. Best grade it had handed out since it started keeping score in 1998, up from a C-minus in 2021. It came attached to a $3.7 trillion gap between what is currently planned and what would put the country in good working order. Four years earlier that gap was $2.59 trillion. Grade up, hole deeper.
One line in that report got almost no coverage. Among the three trends ASCE named as shaping the whole picture: data on key performance indicators is unreliable or unavailable, and there are still sectors where the numbers are scarce. The people writing the report card were telling you they graded part of it in the dark.
What happens when a city actually looks
The National League of Cities ran its Municipal Infrastructure Conditions survey again this May. Streets and roads were rated satisfactory by 55 percent of responding municipalities in 2022. This year the same question came back 38 percent. Sewer went from 62 to 42. Water went from 82 to 39.
Before you reach for the obvious explanation, read NLC's. The report says lower 2026 ratings may reflect greater visibility into existing needs rather than rapid deterioration, and points at new federal funding requirements that pushed cities to assess systems that had been underdocumented.
Nothing collapsed in four years. Cities looked, and what they found was worse than what they had been carrying in their heads. A book nobody is testing always reads clean.
A book nobody is testing always reads clean. The number did not get worse. The number got honest.
Why this fall is the wrong one to be vague in
IIJA's highway and transit authorizations expire September 30, six weeks out. On August 8 the Senate voted 90 to 6 to attach a short-term surface transportation extension to a stopgap funding bill running through December 11. It went to the House and it is not law yet. Either way, the reauthorization that sets formula funding for years gets written in the next few months, while every city in the country argues that its needs are real.
NLC found funding availability was the top influence on capital decisions for 80 percent of respondents, ahead of staff recommendations at 57 percent and elected officials' priorities at 31 percent. Money decides. And when the pot tightens, documented need beats asserted need every time.
Look at how discretionary money gets scored. State of good repair is one of eight merit criteria USDOT uses on RAISE applications, and reviewers weigh whether the benefits a city claims are clear, direct and data driven. A town with dated photographs and condition ratings writes a different application than a town with a paragraph of narrative and a hopeful tone.
I have been the guy without the record
Alpine, Texas was bankrupt and under investigation by the FBI, the attorney general and the Texas Rangers when I took over as city manager. Sitting on the table was a sewer problem with a $3.5 million rebuild attached to it. Somebody went and looked. The actual failure was a lift station, and $40,000 fixed it. The plan was priced at roughly 87 times the repair, and the only thing standing between those two numbers was a walk and a written record.
That is the whole argument. Not knowing is expensive in both directions. It buys work you do not need and it hides work you do.
The version a town can actually run
Someone walks the equipment yard, the lift stations, the shop, the fire bays and the water plant with an iPhone or a standard digital camera. AI turns those photographs into an itemized record carrying location, category, condition notes and a date. Finance reconciles it against the fixed asset register and closes the gaps it finds. Where a government reports eligible infrastructure under GASB 34's modified approach, it already owes a documented and replicable condition assessment at least every three years, so for a lot of towns this is work already on the books that nobody put on a calendar.
There were 90,837 local governments in the United States at the 2022 Census of Governments. Most are small. Most run one finance clerk and a spreadsheet. Most are about to spend a year competing for a shrinking pool of money against places with better paperwork.
I have an interest here and I will name it. GAIN AI does this work. Your auditor and your engineer are the authority on what your specific systems require, and nothing in this issue is legal, engineering or accounting advice. But you do not need any of them to answer one question. If a state or federal reviewer asked your town this week to produce dated photographs and a condition rating for its water system, could you? The towns that can are going to have an easier eighteen months than the towns that cannot.
Reply with your city's name and the one asset class you are least sure about. I will tell you what a defensible record for it looks like and what it takes to build one. No pitch, no deck.
— Erik Zimmer, Founder, GAIN AI | getgainai.com