Obama Calls for Transportation Investment in Speech on Jobs Plan
President Obama called on Congress to pass a $447 billion job-creation plan, including investments in road and highway construction, in a speech Thursday evening.
The plan includes $50 billion for transportation projects, $27 billion of which would be spent on the nation’s highway system.
While addressing a joint session of Congress, Obama said that building a world-class transportation system is part of what made the United States an economic superpower.
He said it’s an “outrage” that there are “badly decaying roads and bridges all over the country” at a time when millions of construction workers are unemployed.
The plan, which the president called the American Jobs Act, combines tax cuts with new government spending.
To help pay for the jobs plan, Obama said he would release “a more ambitious deficit plan – a plan that will not only cover the cost of this jobs bill, but stabilize our debt in the long run,” on Sept. 19.
Highlighting his call for highway investment, in his speech Obama referenced a bridge linking the states of his major Republican rivals, Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
“There’s a bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that’s on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America,” Obama said.
The Brent Spence Bridge, which carries Interstate 75 and Interstate 71 traffic over the Ohio River, is “vital to long-distance state and national commerce,” the U.S. Department of Transportation said.
According to the Federal Highway Administration, “I-75 is one of the busiest trucking routes in North America with truck traffic approaching six billion vehicle miles traveled annually” but at 50 years old has “significant safety and capacity problems.”
While transportation advocates and stakeholders praised the president on his support for infrastructure, several complained that he did not address funding methods.
“We were disappointed that the president’s speech, again, was light on specifics as to how we would generate revenue to pay for these needed infrastructure investments,” said Sean McNally, spokesman for American Trucking Associations.
McNally said ATA looked forward to seeing the funding details and, while it appreciated the president’s awareness about the need to invest more in roads and bridges, eventually, his rhetoric “must match” policy decisions one how to generate money.
Like some other transportation stakeholders, ATA also took issue with the president’s plan to allocate $10 billion of the jobs plan money to create a national infrastructure bank.
In advance of the speech, ATA president Bill Graves urged the president to “avoid the siren song of infrastructure banks or public private partnerships at the expense of stable and reliable sources of funding.”
Both ATA and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are pressing the president and Congress to raise federal fuel taxes.
Obama’s jobs initiative was praised by John Robert Smith, CEO of Reconnecting America, a non-profit organization that works to promote best practices in transit-oriented development.
“Just as our economy has weakened in recent years, so has our nation’s infrastructure,” Smith said in a statement. “What better solution than to have workers focus on our nation’s transit systems, railroads, bridges and highways, all of which are in dire need of repair and improvement.”
Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum, said America’s clean diesel manufacturers are ready and able to meet the challenge to rebuild the nation.
“All of the construction and infrastructure projects outlined tonight by President Obama could begin first thing tomorrow morning thanks to the power, reliability and efficiency of America’s clean diesel engines and equipment,” Schaeffer said in a statement.
UPS Chairman and CEO Scott Davis applauded the White House and congressional leaders both for putting forth plans over the last week to create jobs, help businesses, reform the tax code, pass trade pacts and modernize the nation’s transportation system.
“I’ll wait to see the details as they emerge on how we can get our economy moving and responsibly offset these initiatives, but I am encouraged that both the President and Republican leaders in Congress pledged to work together to find common ground and put people back to work…the American people expect and deserve no less,” Davis said in a statement.
