That's a very fair question. One of the challenges the public sector generally has is that you're subject to the tyranny of cash-in, cash-out annual budgets, and it's very hard for you to amortize costs. So you end up with the paradox where you must appear to save money regardless of the cost.
The problem with short-term programs is that we're dealing with infrastructure assets that are going to have design lives of 25, 30, 50, sometimes 100 years, and the spending decisions are focused very much on the here and now. We don't really take an opportunity to explore how we achieve life-cycle savings by extending the design life of assets. What if the replacement period for infrastructure is 70 years instead of 40 years? What if we can put more effort into the up-front design and planning so that a water treatment plant may require 20 operators instead of 35 operators?