AASHTO Journal, 23 October 2015
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed a bipartisan, six-year authorization bill for highway and transit programs on Oct. 22, clearing it for consideration by the full House whenever leadership decides to schedule it for debate and floor votes.
The committee acted just a week before an Oct. 29 deadline for the Highway Trust Fund to expire, and it was increasingly clear that Congress would need to pass another short-term extension to keep trust fund programs operating while lawmakers continue to work on the major bill..
The timing for the full House to consider the committee’s long-term bill was uncertain. T&I Chairman Bill Shuster, R-Pa., told reporters he was “not sure exactly what the timing is” for when it would move to the House floor — “possibly next week or the week after, but I believe it will be in short order.”
The revenue-raising Ways and Means Committee had not yet tipped its hand on how it would propose paying for the STRRA or when it would offer funding measures.
Its chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has been in GOP negotiations that could make him Speaker of the House in the coming week. Shuster indicated Ryan’s bid to be speaker had complicated the Ways and Means schedule. “It slowed it down some, I’m certain,” Shuster said, according to Politico.
Still, the T&I markup – in which the committee added some amendments but shelved many others after Shuster and ranking member Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., agreed to work with members to try to resolve their issues – means the full House can now consider the long-term bill that state departments of transportation and other investment advocates have been seeking for years.
Once the House passes its bill, it can then negotiate with the Senate over its already-passed DRIVE Act to try to complete final legislation this year that both chambers can accept. If that happens, it would be the first time since 2005 Congress had passed a surface transportation law authorizing programs for more than two years.
The House bill – the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act, or STRRA – mainly keeps the trust fund programs at current spending levels with inflationary increases, and with less funding than in the Senate’s DRIVE Act.
Within those overall totals, however, some programs fare better than others.
As shown in a preliminary staff analysis by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, prepared prior to the Oct. 22 markup, the bill would reduce funding for the USDOT’s low-interest TIFIA loan program to $200 million a year from $1 billion now to help pay for other items.
The House bill would increase the Federal Highway Administration’s highway programs by about 2 percent a year. But it includes a $6 billion rescission of state DOTs’ unobligated contract authority in the midpoint of the bill in 2018, which could complicate their overall use of federal funding allocations.
Despite the committee action, and the momentum it represents, the lack of a final bill already in hand continued to have real-world effects.
The same day the House panel advanced its bill, the Georgia DOT said it had to pull 34 more roadway projects valued at $123 million from its December bidding plans because it could not count on federal reimbursements while the trust fund faces a near-term expiration. (See story in Nation section.)
And a separate deadline looming over the nations’ railroads could add new pressure for Congress to complete a final bill by the end of November.
While the House committee bill includes a proposed three-year extension of a federal deadline for railroads to deploy anti-collision systems called positive train control, a current Dec. 31 PTC deadline in law prompted the big Norfolk Southern Railway to warn it will stop accepting certain hazardous chemicals as of Dec. 1. Those chemicals are heavily used in industry and for crop fertilizers. (See related story.)
NS and many other carriers are not ready to meet the federal deadline despite already spending heavily on those systems, and have been pressing Congress to extend it.
So unless Congress passes a PTC extension outside the highway bill, the NS action effectively gives lawmakers only another month to complete work before the railroads begins interrupting the flow of widely used freight shipments.