AASHTO Journal, 27 February 2015
Key policymakers in Washington pressed executives from state departments of transportation to help sway Congress on passing a long-term surface transportation bill this year, telling those agency officials they can be part of a powerful coalition prompting Congress to act.
Those remarks were repeated in a series of speeches Feb. 25 and 26 at the annual Washington Briefing of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. AASHTO’s Transportation TV has posted separate news videos for each policy-maker’s speech.
Transportation TV has posted news videos for each policy-maker’s speech.Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Environment and Public Works Administration that writes the highway portion of any highway and transit reauthorizing legislation, urged the groups to identify the 17 sitting senators who voted against the 2012 MAP-21 highway bill and have officials from their states go talk with those lawmakers.
“You have to know who the target is,” Inhofe said. “Don’t be shy,” he told them, in helping educate home-state lawmakers about the stakes of congressional action. “You have to let them know how strongly you feel.”
Inhofe said he believes Congress will actually pass a long-term in 2015. But he said “there’s not a chance in the world we could do this” without state DOT officials helping build momentum in a powerful coalition of infrastructure investment advocates that include state chambers of commerce, manufacturers and farm groups.
Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said: “Help us move the bill by talking to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle,” meaning both Republicans and Democrats.
“On my side of the aisle,” Shuster told the AASHTO conference, “there are some who think, ‘oh we spend too much already.’ But I think everybody in this room knows there needs to be significantly more investment into our infrastructure. And my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, when they see a new pot of money they want to come up with six or seven new programs. And we’ve really got to focus what we spend these dollars on.”
He emphasized the need to target funding in a highway bill on “critical infrastructure,” on rebuilding bridges, on highway corridors that are important for freight movements and in adding capacity where needed. “I can’t move a piece of legislation,” Shuster said, “without the stakeholders out there banging the drum.”
Earlier, T&I ranking member Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said he and Shuster were working well together and are largely on the same page about what would go into a highway and transit bill. DeFazio, too, said the state officials’ efforts for a new bill could carry significant weight in Congress.
And Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., ranking EPW member, was unable to attend but sent a message that AASHTO Executive Director Bud Wright read to the conference. “We will need your help to ensure that the bill moves through Congress,” after it emerges from the committee, Boxer wrote, and urged state officials to “speak to your senators and your House members about the importance of federal funding for transportation and passing a transportation bill this spring.”
Boxer also said she is helping organize “a big rally in mid-April for transportation stakeholders, the construction industry, businesses, labor, elected officials and others, to call on Congress to act,” and that she hoped all state DOTs would participate.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told AASHTO members that “we have a context problem in transportation,” and that various advocacy groups have not communicated the nation’s infrastructure needs “in the most hard-hitting way.”
He urged the state officials to “tell the truth to members of Congress” about the disruptive costs of short-term program extensions and how “current funding levels are inadequate.”
Foxx said: “I can’t help you if Congress doesn’t act. If I can’t help you, you can’t help yourselves and the citizens of our country are going to be stuck in traffic.”
DeFazio said he had offered various options to pay for infrastructure legislation but those financing decisions would come out of the Ways and Means Committee. Shuster said he has been talking with those lawmakers about overall dollar levels for a new bill, “trying to push the number up – they may push down.”
Inhofe and Shuster both said their goal remains to get a long-term bill passed by the May 31 expiration of current program authority.
They also rebuffed ideas to devolve the federal program onto states, each pointing to how transportation investment is a constitutional responsibility of Congress.
Inhofe repeated comments he’d made at a hearing the previous day, about how he and another congressman were the first in Washington to propose the devolution idea. He said they considered it a fun way to woo crowds back home who did not like the federal programs.
But Inhofe said devolution would not work and that he is not for it. Actually devolving federal program costs would require states to make huge increases in their own fuel taxes, he said, and then all states would have to make such changes to support the needed investments to maintain a national transportation system.