Blumenauer Revives Effort to Boost Federal Fuel Taxes
This story appears in the Feb. 9 print edition of Transport Topics.
WASHINGTON — Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has reintroduced legislation put forth last year that would increase fuel taxes to pay for the nation’s aging transportation system.
Joined here Feb. 4 by a number of transportation leaders, including American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves, Blumenauer said the Update, Promote, and Develop America’s Transportation Essentials Act, or UPDATE, would add a nickel a year for three years to the existing 24.4-cent federal diesel tax and the 18.4-cent gasoline tax.
Under Blumenauer’s proposal, the fuel levies also would be indexed to inflation, and Congress would “confirm” its intent to replace fuel taxes with what he said would be a “more equitable, stable source of funding” by 2024. The average motorist is paying about half as much per mile as she or he did in 1993, the last time the fuel tax was increased, the congressman said.
The bill, which has nearly two dozen co-sponsors, has been referred to the House Ways and Means panel. Blumenauer, a committee member, told reporters he is hopeful that Rep. Paul Ryan
(R-Wis.), the committee’s chairman, will call the measure up before funding for highway programs runs out in May.
“Everyone agrees that America is falling apart and falling behind. We can’t afford the costs to American families, damage to their cars, cost of congestion, which is countless millions of hours stuck in traffic, and putting them at risk of unsafe road conditions. And putting them at risk in terms of their economic vitality because of the stranglehold that congestion has on the movement of freight and goods,” Blumenauer said at an event on Capitol Hill.
ATA, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the AFL-CIO, AAA, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were among the groups to support Blumenauer in pressing Congress for approval of a long-term highway bill that relies on funding from higher fuel taxes.
“In trucking, our highways and our bridges are certainly an integral element in every facet of our daily lives. All freight modes play a valuable role in the economic lifeline of this country,” said Graves, a former Republican governor of Kansas.
“We’re sort of like the lost generation when it comes to our transportation infrastructure. We stop spending on the things that matter, and then they start falling down,” added Ed Wytkind, head of the AFL-CIO’s transportation trades department. “I think about that collapse of the bridge in Minnesota. That wasn’t a collapse of a bridge. That was a horrific picture of a country that has forgotten how to build things again and how to modernize its economy to make sure it keeps pace with its competitors around the world.”
In 2007, the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 people. It was reopened in 2008.
Congress last summer temporarily extended the existing funding law, MAP-21, to save the federal Highway Trust Fund account from insolvency. MAP-21 is the two-year plan signed into law in 2012.
With the temporary extension projected to run out May 31, congressional Republicans who control the House and Senate have yet to present a plan to boost highway dollars.
