Foxx Urges State Transportation Leaders to Step Up Pressure for Highway Bill
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx urged state transportation leaders to put more muscle into their effort to persuade Congress to pass a long-term reauthorization measure to support the nation’s highways and public transit systems.
State leaders must exert the same kind of pressure they did in 1955 when Congress agreed to build the Interstate Highway System, Foxx said Nov. 23 at the annual meeting of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
“Transportation stakeholders could be fighting harder right now,” Foxx said in prepared remarks to the AASHTO meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he was mayor before joining President Obama’s cabinet in 2013.
“Because in Washington, the conventional wisdom is that, when funding starts to run out in May, Congress is going to do what they’ve done 28 times in the last six years: They’ll pass another short-term patch, that’s probably also short of the funds our transportation system needs,” Foxx said.
“It’s not that they can’t pass a long-term bill,” he said. “It’s that they think they don’t have to. They think that as long as you get level funding in a short-term patch, your states will be happy.”
Tell Congress “no,” Foxx urged the state transportation officials.
The last time lawmakers passed a long-term transportation reauthorization funding law was SAFETEA-LU in 2005.
When that measure expired in 2009, it took three years and several temporary funding extensions to keep the Highway Trust Fund solvent until Congress in 2012 passed a new reauthorization bill.
However, that measure, MAP-21, was for only two years, and the trust fund almost slipped into the red before the funding law expired in September.
This past summer, Congress came up with extra funds from the general fund to extend MAP-21 until May.
President Obama has put forth a four-year, $320 billion transportation plan called the Grow America Act, which Foxx touted during his talk. That plan would be funded in part with money from corporate tax reform.
Without a new funding source, Congress cannot approve a reauthorization bill unless it is willing to continue diverting billions of dollars from the general fund to the trust fund.
Without a long-term funding plan, states cannot build or plan projects, Foxx said, calling attention to a recent action in Tennessee.
That state recently announced it was putting $400 million worth of projects on hold because of the uncertainty caused by Congress’ behavior, Foxx said. More states need to make that kind of a public statement, he added.
