New FHWA Head Says He’s Open to Changes in ’09 Highway Bill’s Size-and-Weight Limits

By Sean McNally, Senior Reporter

This story appears in the March 24 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

WASHINGTON — The new head of the Federal Highway Administration said he was open to considering changes to truck size-and-weight limits and other truck productivity issues as part of the Transportation Department’s proposals for the 2009 reauthorization of federal transportation legislation.

James Ray, who became acting FHWA administrator after Rick Capka stepped down, told Transport Topics the agency would begin issuing some of its proposals for the highway bill reauthorization in the next few months.

“I think that entire debate is getting ginned up now. In terms of when you’re going to start seeing some these proposals, I think you’ll start to see them very soon . . . in the next month or so,” Ray said in an interview earlier this month.

Ray, former chief counsel for the highways agency, indicated that the proposals from FHWA and DOT were unlikely to include any increases in the fuel tax and probably would seek different financing methods for infrastructure funding

“I think our position on financing and our position on ideas of how best to move the Highway Trust Fund forward are fairly well documented and understood,” Ray said.

Ray did show some willingness to discuss truck size-and-weight limits, an issue his predecessor, Capka, and boss, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, have declined to put on the table, except when discussing the possibility of truck-only lanes.

“I think we’re definitely open to looking at it in the next reauthorization,” Ray said. “Our position to date has been we need to look at it on a global, on a national basis. . . . If we’re going to take this up, we’re going to have to take it up as a national issue and not as a state-by-state issue.”

While a spokesman for FHWA told TT that Ray was “the acting administrator, which he will remain . . . until the president nominates and the Senate approves a new administrator,” he is likely to head the agency until the end of the current administration.

The White House has yet to nominate a permanent replacement for Capka, and there are already three DOT nominees awaiting Senate confirmation, including Robert Sturgell to head the Federal Aviation Administration, whose nomination has been in front of the body since October.

Ray said he was “very interested in engaging” trucking on a number of issues that he believes lead to added costs for the industry, including pavement quality and road conditions.

Beyond looking at such issues as size and weight, Ray said much of FHWA’s time in the remaining nine months of the Bush administration would be spent on its two controversial congestion-relief initiatives: Corridors of the Future and the Urban Partnership Agreements program with selected “model cities.”

The corridors program, which was announced last year, designated five highways — interstates 5, 10, 15, 69, 70 and 95 — for an infusion of federal dollars to help ease congestion, particularly freight congestion.

Ray said that FHWA was “in negotiations right now” with the affected states about those projects. “We are now taking those selected corridors, and we’re going through a fairly lengthy negotiation process, where we are refining the ideas” the jurisdictions had in their funding applications, Ray said.

The agency will look at which projects “demand federal resources, federal staff time, federal attention” and then negotiate with states over how much DOT puts into each project and how much the states contribute.

Ray said the urban partnerships, which targeted funds for congestion relief in five cities, including New York’s controversial congestion pricing plan, will be going through an “implementation” process during this year.

“Here are these big concepts, and we’ve got to translate those into activities,” he said.

In recent months, DOT and the Bush administration have begun an assault on congressional earmarks, or funds authorized by Congress for specific projects, saying they were an obstacle to more efficient infrastructure spending and wasteful.

The 2007 spending package passed by the new Democratic Congress stripped all the earmarks out of the DOT budget in order to move the appropriations process quickly.

DOT then used millions of formerly earmarked dollars in new, unobligated earmarks to finance the projects, and rescinded programs such as the truck parking pilot project in order to direct funds to the corridors program. Some members of Congress have criticized the moves.

Ray defended the use of those funds for DOT’s favored projects, asserting that its decisions about the programs were merit-based, rather than politically motivated.

“I think the core distinction is a very methodical, merit-based, need-based review of projects, ideas, concepts and a decision-making process devoid of political influence. That is the key distinction,” he said.

Ray said that while “not all earmarks on the Hill” were politically motivated, “at the end of the day, we of course know that not all earmarks are as well thought-out as the ones that we’ve done as part of our discretionary process.”