Phil Washington grew up on the South Side of Chicago in public housing with a single mom caring for a family of six. “The people building infrastructure in my community did not look like me,” he says. “I wondered, ‘Why can’t I get a job helping to build my own community?’”

Washington instead went first into the U.S. Army. He then rose to a top job at Denver’s Regional Transportation District, where he was an ENR newsmaker for innovation in 2014, and then secured the post of CEO at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. In 2020, he was named to the Biden-Harris transition team working on transportation policy and helped draft the executive order around infrastructure equity that President Biden signed on his first day in office. “We began to think about how to operationalize that executive order,” Washington said at ENR’s Los Angeles Infrastructure Forum last November.