Lawmakers Say Tax Fears May Mean Road Bill Delay
This story appears in the May 31 print edition of Transport Topics.
WASHINGTON — The chances of Congress approving a long-term highway bill this year are slim, key congressional staff members said, and several added that if a bill isn’t passed early in 2011, then it may be dead until after the next presidential election.
“Proceeding to write a bill when you don’t know your dollar amount because you can’t know your funding source gets to be a difficult thing,” said Tom Lynch, staff director of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee’s transportation subcommittee.
“At the present time, there is not a great deal of support [on the Finance Committee] for doing the things that a lot of people in the transportation community want such as increasing the fuels tax,” said Lynch, who works for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.).
“In the absence of something that can replace the fuel tax, we would have to deal with increasing revenue, and I don’t think there’s a majority of senators who support that, especially those who perceive election benefit,” Lynch said.
Lynch spoke at the Coalition for America’s Gateways and Trade Corridors’ annual meeting here.
John Drake, a member of the Democratic staff on the Senate Commerce Committee, said that despite “a lot of talk about getting something this year . . . I think realistically the conversations for this bill will certainly be next year, when hopefully a lot of the hesitation about how you finance this bill will have subsided.”
From the House of Representatives’ side of Capitol Hill, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), top Republican member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, was similarly pessimistic about the chances of Congress agreeing to a fuel tax or passing a bill in 2010.
“Let me be candid: There’s probably not going to be a transportation bill this year,” Mica said, explaining that raising taxes to pay for it would result in Democrats’ defeat at the polls. “If you passed a gas tax now, not only would I be chairman but there’d be no minority members on the committee.”
Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), chairman of the House highways subcommittee, said that without an increase in funding, there’s not likely to be a bill, and it has been difficult to even debate on funding.
“The bottom line is we need a substantial increase in direct investment in our transportation system on a multimodal basis and that means the ‘t-word,’ ” he said, referring to taxes. Republicans don’t “mention the ‘t-word,’ nor do they down at the White House . . . between Republicans and the White House, we aren’t able to have a meaningful discussion.”
DeFazio said Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, “still favors the gas tax . . . and I try to tell him that’s not going to happen.”
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee panel that oversees transportation, told the group that, although she thought she wanted to “move aggressively” on a highway bill, “it is not going to get done overnight [because] there are a lot of questions out there about how we pay for it.”
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said he thought, unless there was a deal quickly, the debate probably would drag on well beyond 2010.
“Unless we get real about how we’re going to finance this going forward . . . we’re going to lose not just another construction season, we’re going lose another [session of] Congress,” Blumenauer said. “I’m not particularly sanguine if this is pushed into the next cycle where it’s going to resolved with six months to go before a presidential election.”
Mica agreed, saying there was “probably a five- to six-month window [in 2011] to get stuff,” before presidential politics made it impossible to pass major legislation.
“I’m optimistic we will get a bill at some point, but we certainly can’t predict when,” said Mary Phillips, a member of the Commerce Committee’s Republican staff.
