Highway Funds Reauthorization Pushed to September or Later
This story appears in the June 27 print edition of Transport Topics.
With Congress slated to spend its summer on budget negotiations and the debt ceiling, legislative leaders said reauthorization of transportation funding has been crowded off the agenda until September, if not later.
Reauthorization was not on the list of summer legislative priorities that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sent to lawmakers recently, even though temporary funding for the nation’s transportation system runs out Sept. 30.
The majority leader plans to meet with John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, to map a legislative path for the reauthorization bill Mica is writing, Cantor spokeswoman Laena Fallon told Transport Topics.
“Is it likely to come up this summer? Unlikely, but that’s not to say it’s not a priority,” Fallon said.
The House has only a limited amount of floor time before August recess and must hold a debt-limit debate and address bills focused on “boosting economic growth,” she said.
However, a senior Democrat on the Transportation Committee, Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio, said the Republicans are not making reauthorization a priority because they know their bill “kills jobs.”
“It’s hard to gin up much enthusiasm for a 35% reduction” in an already underfunded transportation system, said DeFazio, ranking member on the Highways and Transit Subcommittee.
The Federal Highway Administration calculated in 2007 that $1.25 billion in highway capital investment supports 35,000 jobs.
Authorized transportation spending for fiscal year 2011 is $41.1 billion but Mica and other Republicans have pledged to hold spending to the revenue amount in the Highway Trust Fund, which according to federal estimates means annual spending would fall to $31.8 billion.
DeFazio blamed the Obama administration for the current situation for sidetracking reauthorization two years ago.
“The Obama administration . . . has wanted to talk about infrastructure but not invest in it,” DeFazio said. “And, now, they’ve got the Republicans who want to disinvest in it. So I don’t see a really clear path out of this morass at the moment.”
The current six-year transportation funding plan, known as SAFETEA-LU for Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient, Transportation Equity Act, expired in September 2009. Since then, Congress has passed several short-term extensions to keep the system solvent.
“The president precipitated the crisis by stopping reauthorization when the Democrats were in charge,” DeFazio said.
In 2009, DeFazio explained, he and former Transportation Committee Chairman James Oberstar, (D-Minn.), who lost reelection last year, introduced a reauthorization plan but Obama persuaded House leaders to delay action.
This year, Obama unveiled his own $556 billion reauthorization plan but did not name a funding source.
“Other than that it was great thing,” DeFazio said.
If Obama was “living and breathing and advocating infrastructure investment” reauthorization could be accomplished, DeFazio said.
DeFazio said he has suggested possible revenue sources to Jason Furman, who heads the president’s National Economic Council.
“I said, ‘If you guys want this investment, you got to push it and you’ve got to make a point that we’re on the edge of a cliff here,’ ” DeFazio said.
DeFazio said he had suggested fuel taxes could be indexed to construction cost inflation but that Furman dismissed the idea. The congressman said indexing would raise fuel taxes only an “increment” and bonds could be sold against some of the future revenues to raise cash to create jobs.
“Imagine if two years from today, the gas tax went up by a penny and we used that this year to put a few million people to work,” DeFazio said, adding that popular opposition would be minimal.
“Exxon Mobil raises the price a dime between the time I drive to work . . . and the time I drive back and [Furman] thinks people are going to get upset if we took a penny and it put people to work,” DeFazio said.
Greg Cohen, president of the American Highway Users Alliance, said reauthorization is too complex an issue to get accomplished in September even if House leaders agree to put it on the calendar then.
That means there will have to be another funding extension before reauthorization work can be completed, Cohen said.
“The question will be: ‘Is there an extension because we haven’t finished it or is there an extension because we haven’t started?’ ” Cohen said.
