When you look at a city’s sidewalks, streets, parks, trees, and public facilities, you learn a lot about how that city is governed.
Right now, Los Angeles faces a growing infrastructure challenge. Sidewalks remain in disrepair, accessibility improvements lag behind need, parks face ongoing funding pressures, and critical public assets require greater investment and coordination.
As Los Angeles enters the 2025-26 fiscal year facing a significant budget deficit, these challenges are exposing a deeper structural issue: the City lacks a long-term system for planning, prioritizing, funding, and managing infrastructure.
Today, Los Angeles makes infrastructure decisions largely through annual budgets, individual projects, and department-specific processes. Without a shared, multi-year framework, it becomes difficult to assess needs, establish priorities, make tradeoffs, or measure progress over time.
The result is a system that too often operates reactively rather than strategically.
A Capital Infrastructure Program (CIP) can help change that.
A CIP is a multi-year planning and budgeting tool that helps cities understand infrastructure needs, establish priorities, identify funding sources, coordinate investments across departments, and track progress over time. It provides a transparent framework for making decisions about public assets and helps ensure that infrastructure investments align with long-term goals.
Los Angeles remains the largest major U.S. city without a comprehensive Capital Infrastructure Program.
At a time of growing infrastructure needs and limited resources, the City can no longer afford to make decisions one budget cycle at a time. A Capital Infrastructure Program would help Los Angeles better understand its needs, make priorities clearer, and invest more strategically in the public assets that residents rely on every day.
The question is no longer whether Los Angeles needs a Capital Infrastructure Program.
The question is how quickly the City can build one.
