Editorial: Infrastructure Week Blues

Attending Infrastructure Week events and watching Congress work on a surface transportation bill reminds one of the value of hand-eye coordination.

At its best, there’s LeBron James taking aim at the hoop and using just the right touch to drain a basket at the buzzer. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is so taken with the Cleveland Cavaliers star that he said America needs a LeBron-equivalent to get infrastructure legislation moving.

On the other end of the coordination spectrum, there’s Congress and the administration, still stumbling along.

Many people do a good job of seeing the problem and analyzing it. Several stories in this issue — including one on the front page — feature a large number of people, in and out of government, who know freight transportation well, appreciate its importance to the economy and have a large stock of good ideas for making the country work better.

(Congress is actually supposed to help with that from time to time, really.)

There is a good argument, not unique to us, that says locking the members of House Transportation and Infrastructure and Senate Environment and Public Works in a room together would produce a respectable authorizing plan in not too much time.

The problem comes with switching from eye to hand, or diagnosis of the problem to financing the solution. There is nothing approaching a consensus in Washington on how to pay for a massive, multiyear plan.

A minority says end the federal program and just have states take over. This is the “devolution” caucus, and we note with interest that state governors aren’t a big part of membership.

Repatriation windfall is favored by the Obama administration, but Senate Finance Chairman Orin Hatch (R-Utah) has quite reasonably trashed this idea because a long-term plan should not be financed with money found one time.

A wise few, including us, back increases in diesel and gasoline taxes, where road users pay for what they use. “Tax increase,” though, is anathema to many elected officials.

We’re not big fans of tolling, but even if there were a groundswell for tolls, it is hard to use them in all cases.

So we remain stuck with 32 short-term extensions over six years, and No. 33 is probably coming around May 31, more or less.

As Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said recently while discussing the federal government and transportation, “This is kind of a joke.”

There needs to be better hand-eye coordination to get things done after the problem has been spotted.