and expand its of people have better access to that program in california. we specifically, our office did not work with private companies for during the engagement process for the program, low income, affordable insurance programs, to give us the opportunity to educate people. mr. hunter: i would like to ask each panelist a final question and that is really an hour role at pew as a policy institute. putting this information from a policy makers as you are considering whether and how to approach these laws in your jurisdictions. i would like to start with michelle and go down the line. what is your biggest piece of advice and lessons learned from your experience? what's the most important take away for you from your work in this process? ms. waslin: i've learned so much. i think the biggest take away for me was that the legislatures must speak to the dmv's as they are writing legislation.

not when it's time for apple meditation because there is so much mutual learning and needs to take place. california in for me i would say absolutely engage early, engaged during the legislative debate. engage the federal government. understand the system, processes, and understand the dmv's engagement with immigration enforcement and homeland security. that process is very important. if your state decides to proceed with a marked card, that is a process of trial and error sometimes where homeland security may approve or reject your card and you have to go back to the drawing board. understand the process within the dmv and the federal government so as legislators you can better navigate the process. mr. vien: early engagement is

key. obviously we are engaged early but having been engaged early there are still things on the other side during implementation where we should've looked at that little further. one b we should have reached out to the consulates earlier. not really thinking of them as a resource to have their finger on undocumented communities. that would have been something very helpful in our planning because our numbers might be higher. we really don't know. all the different planning and pulling from different resources as possible. having that large stakeholder group early on was very beneficial for us in planning. hopefully we will see that payoff and a couple of months. say basedson: i would on lessons learned from the vatican weekend over communicate is enough. i think it's very important to identify through your stakeholders are upfront. you have enough states that

implanted this now to reach out to them based on research. it truly is a huge undertaking for a state to implement this. there are so many stakeholders involved from law enforcement to the foreign officials to your legislatures, then down to the dmv staff. i can't emphasize enough the need to communicate that openly and clearly with everybody who needs to be involved in this process. mr. hunter: i like things in threes and i'm hearing communication, constant engagement, and research. thank you all for coming and please join me in thanking our panelists. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] mr. hunter: i would like to recognize the team efforts. the communications team. our government relations team jk my own team and karina

who has spearheaded all this for us this afternoon. thank you and enjoy your afternoon. [applause] >> the chairman of the committee benghazicongress' investigation insists his program is about the facts of the terrorist siege that killed ." spoke onans -- "face the nation as it elijah cummings. we have comments from both. >> the majority leader, kevin mccarthy has suggested this committee has driven down hillary clinton's poll numbers. a congressman or new york city was a leak this is a political investigation. a former investigator on your team has said this was a politically motivated investigation. why would always people say

that? >> i guess because they don't have any idea of artifacts are. if you look at the facts, we have done 50 witnesses. one of home you could argue was exclusively related to her e-mail and i was the shortest interview we have done. we had 50,000 new documents. lesson 5% have anything to do with secretary clinton. she is an important witness but she is one witness. we will have interviewed 70 witnesses. she is one out of the 70. i get this she gets more attention than the other 69. but if you ask me the eyewitnesses on the ground that night in benghazi are more important to me as a former prosecutor than the former secretary of state. >> it's clear to me he can try to dismiss the words of congressman mccarthy, the second-highest ranking member in congress. you can try to dismiss the words of commerce and hannah --

congressman hannah and of his hand-picked investigator that quick. he keeps saying don't listen to what they say, they don't know anything. we were on the committee to. there are five democrats on the committee and we know what is going on. listen to this. he has not yet interviewed the head of the cia. but he brought in -- he is not yet interviewed the head of the joint chiefs, the secretary of defense, none of that. statemer secretary of hillary clinton testifies before the house select committee on benghazi this thursday. we have complete coverage live at 10:00 am on c-span3, c-span radio, and c-span.org. "orion"this year published a series called "reimagining infrastructure."

, including transportation and community involvement. panelists including a housing and urban development official who previously led efforts in washington to make that city more livable and walkable. from the commonwealth club in san francisco, this is one hour. h. emerson: as we all know, american infrastructure is crumbling. this includes congested airports, first did water mains, and our roads are further examples of the way that american infrastructure is crumbling. the biggest problem lies not

with this condition, but with the outdated philosophy that underlies it. much of the physical structure that we live with was imagined and built in an era when economic growth was assumed to be a god-given right, natural resources seemed limitless, and no one had ever heard of climate change. today, that philosophy has manifested in the absence of meaningful mass transportation, water management systems, and designers had never considered that water would become scarce. also in food production systems with factory farms and the use of refrigerated trucks to carry foods across the country. resources grow scarcer and the concentration of carbon dioxide increases upwards and that

philosophy has been revealed to be faulty. but more and more people are embracing a new philosophy, one that is hopeful and realistic. citizens, organizations, and communities all across the country are beginning to understand the critical need to reimagine our infrastructure and the opportunity that such reimagining presents for a new philosophy to be put into practice. they are not talking about repairs or retrofits because they know that is not sufficient. they are talking about something completely different. "orion," the magazine of which i am editor, has been publishing a series of articles called "reimagining infrastructure." we have identified infrastructure as an aspect of american life were people felt that they could make the most difference.

as part of a partnership, "orion" published 12 articles over the course of two years that showcased projects from around the country and we are setting a new bar for how we think about infrastructure. these articles describe the way in which we look at public and private enterprises, communities, and grassroots groups that are coming together to create infrastructure that is putting a premium on sustainability, community engagement, and innovation. to see all of these articles and to learn more about the projects, you are welcome to go to the "orion" website at orionmagazine.org/infrastructure and get more information there. i would like to turn this over to our experts, harriet is at the office of community planning at the u.s. department of

housing and urban development. she has extensive experience on the local, state, and national levels in these communities and works on helping these economies. harriet worked to make washington, d.c. a walkable, bikable, livable city, redefining the city's zoning code for the first time in 50 years. my next guest currently leads a master plan for the ocean beaches in california. ben has developed an exhibition of a historical survey of san francisco. he is a lecturer and an instructor of the graduate program of urban and regional planning at san jose state university and has taught at the san francisco art institute. ginger is the author of three books and has published essays in "harpers," "the new york times," and "orion." she has just completed her last

article on infrastructure about burlington, vermont's decision to take control of its own power supply. ginger has received grants for the new york foundation of the arts, the mellon foundation, as well as the eisenhower foundation as well as residency groups and the center for land use interpretation and she lives in new york city. harriet, let's begin with you. harriet: great, thank you, chip. i am going to talk a little bit about transportation and what i am going to tell you about my experience in the district of columbia demonstrates a little bit about what chip is talking about -- thank you -- about how infrastructure can help a place engage with the community and actually engage in innovation.

so infrastructure in the deficits that we had in the category are not going to be met overnight or remedied overnight. we need to also think about our infrastructure in a different sort of way. dce --n to do that in system,h our transit where we had comparative advantages. we had the metro system, we had a bus system, so we had both rail and buses. we had a great network of walkable streets, right? really wonderful street networks but that does not mean that we had a lot of people writing the buses and trains or people walking on the streets. one of things that became clear to us was with these competitive advantages, having these assets, we could really do a lot more with them.

we really began to see transportation and the choices we could bring to the city as an even greater source of comparative advantages. i have a number of graduate students and the audiences and i heard them talking before our program began about how rough it is to graduate from college with so much college debt. we have a dozen colleges and universities in washington and 80 more higher institutions for learning, so the strategy in d.c. was to see what we could do to retain the students who got educated in the city and what we could do to attract more college students to be there? we thought if we could make transportation really inexpensive and so that people could it around and meet every daily need, that that could be another source of comparative advantage. indeed, that crushing college

debt really prevents people from being able to make a start on the rest of their lives. so giving people the chance to pay down that debt without having to make a car payment or pay for the maintenance of an automobile seemed like a really great thing. we knew that that strategy was working in d.c. where we saw a national ranking that said that we had the highest amount of college debt in the city, so we were winning, and the lowest amount of default rates. so we knew that we were winning. we had businesses looking for knowledge to workers coming to knowledgeable workers coming to the district of columbia, so it was a successful strategy in that sense. transportation is a form of affordability. having transportation choices mean that the second-biggest household expense after housing could be much, much less.

in fact, if you put those two expenses together, none of us have a housing bank account at a transportation bank account, i mean, you could really make another more expensive city a lot more affordable because you could just increase transportation. that helps people a lot at every income level in the district of columbia. so it turns out the transportation can also be about a source of resilience. do you remember that little event that we had in 2008 called the great recession? in the district of columbia, we had something happening very odd in 2008. hundreds of cars started dropping out of the vehicle registration rolls. we asked, what was going on? people were dialing down their transportation costs because they could and because they were concerned about the economy. they might have lost a job or someone in their household had a cut in their hours, and they were trying to manage it the best they could to weather the financial storms. and what happened is that we had very little mortgage defaults in the district of columbia, very little bankruptcy and foreclosure, compared to the rest of the region to be at we had the same jobs and housing

markets and that was based on whether people could dial down the transportation costs. another example of transportation choices providing resilience is in august of 2011, we had a very rare event in the district, we had an earthquake. they had no idea what was going on. 10 minutes after the earthquake, the office of personnel management, in their infinite wisdom, let every single federal worker go at the same a second. so we had a massive traffic jam. 10 minutes after that, every single bike share bike in the downtown was gone. if you are like me, you have a totally and utterly monday and mundane commute home

and you could sail past people, but if you were in a car, you were in that car for 2-3 hours trying to get home. so those transportation choices, using those spaces on the street and sidewalk meant that we could evacuate a lot of people from the center of the city without having to build any new infrastructure to do it. transportation choices can be a source of health. this point, more than half of the trips in the district are taken by walk or by bike or by transit. so our poorest people are still much healthier than the average poor people in the country because they have a way of getting daily exercise. transportation can be a source of neighborhood safety and vitality. the more you can get people to walk and bike, literally the more eyes you have on the street and a safer it is for people to be out and you get a different sort of traffic when it comes to retail and other establishments.

that lower costs that you have for transportation also means that you have more disposable income to spend locally, because if you have automobility as your main way of getting around, and if you use it that goes out of the local economy, but that is not so if you are walking or biking or even taking mass transit. these choices are an enormous source of access to jobs and to opportunity. i mean, imagine if you live in a place where an automobile is the necessary prerequisite to even a first step on the run of economic opportunity -- rung of economic opportunity. it is a huge source of economic mobility in the district of columbia. and finally, i will say that transportation is also an

enormous source of innovation, those transportation choices. you live in a city that is like the district of columbia and it has experienced a lot of innovation. think about car2go and zipcar and uber and lyft and all of these other choices. they are taking advantage of things that shows the millennial generation that automobiles, as it turns out, is something that is used 5% of the time and is parked 95% of the time. so millennials were smart enough to realize that they didn't want to use that on-demand service

and it has really spurred a lot of innovation. a lot of these services can be called in an instant using a smart phone. it is kind of ironic that it is so radically reshaping transportation when in fact in the early 20th century, the disruptive technology was human travel patterns were basically the same way for the last 6000 years, and it was only after we embraced the automobile that we changed the infrastructure and the very form of our city to accommodate that technology. i think one of the things that we have learned is that humans like walkable neighborhoods. our quality oft life is about our quality of

in cities like washington, d.c. and san francisco, we get to see that on a daily basis. and with that i will turn it to my colleagues. ben: good evening, i had a great pleasure last week of visiting hoover dam, which is in many ways, the apotheosis of a previous generation's iteration of infrastructure. we may all have concerns about that philosophy today, but it is extraordinary work of civic and art and it is a beautiful, beautiful thing to see.to so the urbanization of the west would not have been possible if not for the hoover dam and civil projects. it is very much on my mind as we

reflect tonight on the meaning of infrastructure and how that meaning is changing. i am going to talk primarily about projects here in san francisco, especially the ocean beach master plan, which is an attempt to create a long-term plan for the adaptation of san francisco's pacific coast, which is facing severe erosion from coastal storms, which is likely to worsen as sea levels rise. it is really a story of a complex of traditional, fixed infrastructure that is placed there to protect coastal water and sewage infrastructure. and that traditional, fixed infrastructure is facing a very uncertain and dynamic future. and so the story of coming to terms with that and trying to plan for that ends up touching a themes about how

infrastructure is changing and what we can do to fix that. there is three miles of beach subjected to very heavy and intense surf. it is a recreational area and it is a national park and part of a system of national, local, and regional parks that are very popular throughout the region and it is where we go on the rare occasion where san francisco is hot. the ocean beaches is thronged with people but it is a beloved landscape all of the time. the complex of the infrastructure that i was referring to was built to get san francisco into compliance with the clean water act of the 1970's, and san francisco had a combined sewer and water storm systems, which means that the storm drains go to the same place that toilets and sinks go . advantage in that you

can then treat the stormwater water, but it is a disadvantage that the system can become overwhelmed in a wet weather system. so from that infrastructure, they were able to reduced the number of issues to about 70 per year and now there are about seven per year today. most are unaware that that is the case. unfortunately, the system is located immediately adjacent to the coast where this erosion is taking place, and the city's response has been very dramatic. there has been ad hoc place of boulders and they do a good job of protecting against erosion, but also compromise the quality of the beach by covering it up, narrowscing secondary along the beach and degrading both the access to the water and the aesthetics of the beach.

this also got them in hot water with the california coastal commission because they did not have a long-term strategy in place. so that is the landscape that my organization came to, requested by some community-led task forces led by grants by the california coastal conservancy, the san francisco public utilities commission and the national park service. there is something that is political deadlock about that and there is a sense of either/or, are you for coastal armoring or for retreat? so we initiated a two and a half

year process in which we tried to really convey the technical challenges that we were facing with the current infrastructure system, the way the coastal dynamic shapes the beach and drives that erosion, the user issues, and we tried to get all of the stakeholders to understand how many different things this place had to solve for, and find a way forward. so through that process, we came up with the ocean beach master plan. that fundamentally includes many recommendations, but the core of the plan is to incrementally close a stretch of our coastal highway, over a period of decades, and use the space that you pick up by doing that to create a much more flexible approach to the problem, and going from a kind of either/or mode to total management.

so we would have a number of plans in place, including beach which was at the place where it is being dredged for application purposes, and low-profile structural protection and it is much less intrusive than the armoring solution, and since that time, we've been working with the agencies to implement various pieces of the plan. there is a lot involved, not only with the protection of the coast, but the way to make that possible. so i think that this story sort of touches on a number of different important themes. one is the idea that we need to be designing for change at this point. the future is not going to look like the past. in some ways, we had an advantage at ocean beach in that we could already see erosion happening. it is not an abstract, someday

problem. this was a problem that was already taking place. that kind of adept of management approach is something we need to be thinking about, not one of fixed solution, but a series of solutions over time and by how the landscape changes. the second is the idea of a multi-objective approach, that either/or mentality. my imperative to win out here means that we like to the good about this as the city is bringing to planning to be mostly the process of scientists and engineers and academics. the group of city planners looks at multiple systems and how they interact and finding the most optimal solution that solves as many situations as possible. another way of thinking about that at ocean beaches that we were talking about is the interaction of several different infrastructures, some of which are somewhat more novel to think of in that way, so opposite of

sewer infrastructure is also the road, also the beach itself and the ecosystem services that that provides in terms of habitat, in terms of recreation, and so forth, and then also the system itself, the pre-existing situations and a new approach to a less obtrusive structure. thinking about how these different kind of imperatives kind of present themselves arough the infrastructure was big part of what we are doing. finally, just the importance of water, both fresh and salt, as we contemplate the severe drought that we are facing here in california, so many of these issues relate to water in terms of managing the combined sewer and stormwater flow of the system and also dealing with coastal erosion and damage caused by ocean water, so i will hold it there and we will look

forward to more discussion. ann: this is ann clark of the commonwealth club of california, "reimagining infrastructure." we have the principal deputy and assistant secretary from the office of community planning and development at hud. ginger is a journalist and historian and you just heard from benjamin grant, who is an urban design policy advocate here in san francisco. our next speaker will be ginger. ginger? ginger: thank you, so i am a writer, not a planner, so i don't have the same deep level of expertise as my fellow panelists. i did write a book about niagara falls, which i sometimes described as a giant piece of infrastructure disguised as a natural wonder. then i subsequently wrote a book

about the interstate highway system, which i came to see as a giant natural wonder disguised as a piece of infrastructure. [laughter] ginger: which i suppose that is why "orion" suggested i write a piece on community power and reimagining infrastructure, the series of sparked tonight's panel. reporting kind of gives you a sense of the big picture, so i thought i would just share the big picture ideas and also some of the surprising things that i learned in writing about community power, specifically on burlington, vermont, but also looking at other community power projects across the nation. a number of things were surprising about this, the first being the variety of projects that were happening and the variety of places where they were happening. so to me, it didn't seem surprising that burlington, the npr-listening, the

green mountain, are too small chocolate-making town, decided tobuild a plant and started develop their own power in the 80's. a majority of the town decided to create a hydroelectric plant when they made a contract with a wind producer, they then were able to source 100% of their power renewably and also locally, being the first major city to do that. of course, they are vermont's largest city, so it is quite an accomplishment. it also wasn't surprising to me to hear the story of home, massachusetts, which was a very early community power town. a turbine themselves

and it was so successful that they built a second one. i was a little surprised to hear that the exact same thing happened in willmar, minnesota, and it was quite surprised to hear towns like st. george, utah were installing community solar projects. and spearfish, south dakota, a town i have never been to, actually, i wish i could've gone reporting for this piece, because i just love the name so much, another community power town, purchased an old mining hydro plant and rehabbed it and started generating their own power. so the range of these projects surprised me. the range of the type of power projects in the type of communities that decided to get involved in doing this. so the question is, why, why

would these communities do this? and that was kind of surprise number two, the variety of reasons that places decided to start to develop their own power. burlington has actually rested there are municipal utility, which was at the time at the hands of a private company, and they turned it into a municipal utility a century ago, and they did it because money. the rates were too high. not surprising. money is still a reason that many towns are trying to get in on the community power. it can be a source of revenue for a town. and with public power, actually public power consumers pay significantly less on average, then private power consumers. -- than private power consumers. some towns wanted to develop green power. boulder, colorado recently didn't renew the contract with their private power producer because they were tired of the company dragging its feet and

the citizens just said, great, we will do it ourselves. another reason is to get more responsiveness from the power company. winter garden, florida, needed a series of upgrades and they said, we are not going to do it via contract, we are going to do it via a municipal utility. they invested taxpayer dollars in their needed upgrades and now they are actually paying less for their power than they were before. another common reason is the sort of typical buy local reason we think of when we think of our food systems often. but some towns are thinking this way when it comes to power. it keeps jobs in the community, it keeps profits in the community, and howard, south dakota even used it as a role in the economic redevelopment of the town and hired a bunch of

out-of-work tractor mechanics and opened a turbine repair facility and built themselves a wind turbine and created stability for the town. the thing for me is that all of these towns are part of a larger movement, a movement you may have heard of, toward distributive power. i think the thing that all of us have been thinking about is infrastructure being more distributed in the new century. the 20th century move for power to be centralized, vertically integrated, and scaled up were pretty big, huge power plants out in the pucker brush. i've never heard that statement before but i loved it. in the 21st centurt