Bush Taps Democrat Mineta As Transportation Secretary

President-elect George W. Bush named Norman Y. Mineta, a former chairman of the House Public Works and Transportation Committee, to head the Department of Transportation.

	U.S. Dept. of Commerce
	Norman Y. Mineta

Mineta is currently President Bill Clinton’s secretary of commerce, and is the only Democrat named to Bush’s cabinet.

Mineta, 69, served 21 years in the House of Representatives and rose through the ranks to chair the Public Works Committee, which parcels out transportation money, in the last two years before the Republicans took control of Congress. He retired from his California congressional seat in 1995 after losing the chairmanship of the committee to Bud Shuster (R-Pa.). (Coincidentially, Shuster announced his retirement from Congress last week. See related story, Page 3.)

Mineta was instrumental in writing the landmark Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991. He also co-sponsored an unsuccessful attempt that year to raise the federal tax on diesel fuel and gasoline by 5 cents a gallon.

He saw ISTEA as a means to involve municipal government in overall decisions of what to do with federal transportation money. As a former mayor of San Jose, Calif., he stressed that funding should be flexible, rather than locked into specific categories by Washington, so that state and local authorities could spend the money on their greatest surface transportation needs.

For the full story, see the Jan. 8 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.