AASHTO Journal, 20 March 2015
A coalition of 38 leading transportation trade associations and business groups sharply criticized proposals to transfer the federal highway program to states, warning in a March 16 letter to Congress such “devolution” would endanger state finances and the nation’s ability to respond to emergency needs.
Instead of cutting the federal role, those groups said they “support passage of a robust, long-term bill that will provide certainty for the nation’s future transportation needs.”
Their call to fight devolution efforts was echoed by key lawmakers and witnesses at the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, in a March 17 hearing on reauthorizing the Highway Trust Fund.
The industry letter said a bill in the previous Congress proposed slashing federal fuel taxes and shrinking the federal-aid highway program to just $8 billion by 2019 from $45 billion now. It would have also ended the federal transit program that draws $8 billion from the Highway Trust Fund.
The Senate “soundly defeated” the measure last July, the letter noted, but some conservative advocacy groups are again trying to build momentum for the concept.
However, the American Trucking Associations, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and 36 other groups forcefully opposed devolution in the letter, and offered a detailed rebuttal. “Devolution proposals are not a solution to the long-term infrastructure funding question,” their letter said, “but rather serve as a distraction from the debate about how best to fully fund our nation’s infrastructure.”
The writers noted that the idea of turning the program over to states does not mean the user fee receipts now going into the Highway Trust Fund would go to state coffers. “Under devolution this money simply goes away,” they wrote, “forcing state and local governments to replace tens of billions of dollars with tax increases or redirection of their existing resources.”
To make up the difference and simply maintain current spending levels, states on average would have to increase their own fuel taxes about 23 cents a gallon by 2020, the letter said.
It also said the devolution concept “represents abandonment by Congress of a most fundamental constitutional obligation to promote interstate commerce, and would prove disastrous to state and local governments’ ability to maintain, improve and coordinate their transportation systems when it is widely acknowledged that current resources are already seriously insufficient.”
Wyoming Department of Transportation Director John Cox took that concern directly to Congress in the reauthorization hearing. He said an analysis from the American Road & Transportation Builders Association showed Wyoming would have to increase motor fuel user charges another 30.5 cents if the federal program went away, just to maintain current funding levels.
Cox said much of the traffic on Interstate 80 across his state is from cross-country freight trucks moving between Midwest and West Coast markets, and said Wyoming depends on the federal program to help maintain the infrastructure that national freight market uses. “The strong federal role in partnership has been proven for over a hundred years,” Cox said.
T&I Chairman Bill Shuster, R-Pa., said he does not advocate devolution, but the idea comes up every time Congress works on a transportation bill.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said besides the financial impact it would mean for states to come up with their own funds to cover all their needs, devolution could create a “hodge-podge” of infrastructure development without a national “connectivity” that commerce requires. It would create “turmoil” for major segments of the highway network, he said.
Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the committee’s ranking member, asked the hearing witnesses to again state their opposition to devolution and to underscore their need for the federal program.
“We still have a few devolutionists around here,” DeFazio said. “I just want to put a nail in the coffin, stake through the heart and garlic around the neck.”
McCrory also said that “infrastructure does not recognize city, county or state boundaries. Congestion doesn’t recognize that; neither does environment recognize that, and trade doesn’t recognize that.”