Senate Panel Sets Hearing on DOT Nominee Foxx

This story appears in the May 20 print edition of Transport Topics.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation is scheduled hold its hearing this week for Anthony Foxx, the Charlotte, N.C., mayor whom President Obama has nominated to lead the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The May 22 hearing was announced last week by Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).

Update: Foxx highlights transportation priorities at hearing.

Obama announced the nomination of Foxx to replace Ray LaHood late last month.

Foxx will likely face questions on how he will handle the nation’s transportation funding crisis, said Carl Davis, senior policy analyst at The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington think tank.

“Assuming that Mayor Foxx is confirmed, the Highway Trust Fund is going to run out of money on his watch so, hopefully, they’ll be asking questions on how he’s going to deal with that,” Davis said.

The Congressional Budget Office has said highway and transit funds will be insolvent by fiscal 2015 — which begins Oct. 1, 2014, the day after the most recent transportation reauthorization law, MAP-21, expires.

Foxx, finishing his second two-year term as mayor, was the first Democrat in 22 years elected mayor of Charlotte. He was a staffer for the House Judiciary Committee from 1999 to 2001.

If Foxx, who is also an attorney, is confirmed, he will have to address several issues facing the trucking industry.

“We’re looking forward to hearing Mayor Foxx’s views on a number of subjects important to our industry,” said Sean McNally, spokesman for American Trucking Associations. “From safety issues to how to finance improvements to our transportation system to the role of goods movement in that system, we expect the Senate Commerce Committee will give Mayor Foxx a full and fair vetting.”

As secretary, Foxx also would oversee work on the new national freight network being crafted by DOT and the truck size-and-weight study the department is doing. The study was mandated by Congress, which also has ordered DOT to do a field study on the new hours-of-service rule governing driver restarts set to take effect on July 1.

Foxx has been lauded as a leader in urban transportation, having overseen Charlotte’s new streetcar system and a plan to extend its light-rail line.

Several committee members are from rural states and tend to see fuel tax revenue as the way to fund highway construction, while urban lawmakers’ priorities tend to be congestion and public transit.

Commerce’s ranking member, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), for example, represents a state with 833,300 residents, while the city of Charlotte has 731,000, according to U.S. census data.

Committee member Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) represents an East Coast state, but its largest city — Manchester, with a population of 109,500 — is one-seventh the size of Charlotte.

The traditional rural-urban divide on spending priorities, however, may be overshadowed during the nomination hearing, Davis said.

“The whole rural-urban split about how to spend the money, I think, takes a back seat to how you get the money in the first place,” he said.

The two methods that “actually raise significant revenue are the gas tax and the vehicle-miles-traveled tax, and it’ll be interesting to see how those come up in the hearing,” Davis said.

American Trucking Associations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and some environmentalists have said they want to increase federal diesel and gasoline taxes.

Foxx would be wise to avoid being “painted into a corner” by the committee on either tax issue, which need presidential and congressional attention, Davis said.

Rockefeller also scheduled a May 23 hearing on the nomination of Penny Pritzker to be secretary of commerce, while the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted May 16 to send the nomination of Gina McCarthy as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to the full Senate for a vote.

Earlier this month, Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee blocked a vote on McCarthy’s nomination by not showing up for a meeting.