Oberstar Reflects on Career, Regrets Lack of New Road Bill

This story appears in the Nov. 22 print edition of Transport Topics.

WASHINGTON — Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), the outgoing chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said the failure to pass a new highway spending bill was perhaps his greatest regret in his nearly half-century working on transportation policy.

“I feel it is a big hole in the legislative agenda, not having completed that work,” Oberstar said during a Nov. 16 press conference.

Oberstar was narrowly defeated by Republican Chip Cravaack in his bid for an 18th term representing Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District.

“We reported a bill from subcommittee in June 2009 and would have done so earlier,” if the White House and Senate had been able to agreement on how to fund the bill.

Despite that, he said he moved ahead with his proposal because it was “important to get the policy changes clarified in bill form and moved through subcommittee so when an agreement is possible on a financing method, we’ll be ready to move ahead,” he said.

Oberstar blamed both the Obama administration and the Senate, but for different reasons.

Obama, he said, “was very true to his pledge during the campaign: ‘I will not raise your taxes,’ and for that reason, the White House policy staff said the administration could not support an increase in the user fee.”

Oberstar said he thought it would be easier in the Senate, but the only support came from retiring Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio).

“And as the year wore on and as the Senate mounted 104 filibusters against House-passed bills, it became apparent that the Senate was just a formula for gridlock and nothing was going to be accomplished there,” he said.

Oberstar suggested that if the administration “had just simply accepted my idea and the recommendations of two national commissions . . . recommending up to a 25-cent in the gas tax, or user fee, the whole issue would have been history, we’d have had a bill, it’d have been law and we’d be moving ahead,” he said.

As it stands now, Oberstar recommended that Congress pass a one-year authorization before the end of the year, rather than a series of shorter term extensions “to hold somebody’s feet to the fire. That is simply not reasonable.”

“If we’re not going to do the six-year bill, then we ought to do a one-year authorization in the hope that the new Congress will come to an agreement on a financing mechanism for a six-year bill,” he said.

Looking ahead, he said the new Congress will have “a much more conservative ideology” than the current one.

One area in particular, he said, was in the use of earmarks — a practice of members of Congress directing funding to specific projects.

Oberstar called blanket opposition to earmarking “simplistic,” adding that opponents of earmarks, in essence, believe “members of Congress should not have a role in directing the resources of the federal government.”

“If you subscribe to that notion, then [the] executive branch, either at the national level or at the state level, makes all the decisions,” he said.

Oberstar’s departure will leave the House transportation panel without his services for the first time since the 1960s, something he called “the end of an era.”

“I’m ending where I started in 1963 as clerk of the subcommittee on rivers and harbors,” he said. “And now I conclude as chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.”

Known for his lectures on the history of transportation policy, Oberstar noted the transportation committee was the successor of the first committee of the first Congress — the Committee on Rivers and Harbors. The first act of that committee in 1789 was for the establishment and maintenance of a lighthouse at the entrance of Hampton Roads, he said.

“My service to the Congress,” he said, “has been for movement of people and goods, safely, efficiently, effectively for the greater good of the nation,” he said.

Oberstar indicated he’d still be working as an advocate for transportation, but “you’ll not see my name at any lobbying firm.”

“Nothing against lobbying firms; I think they provide a great service to the Congress, to the country, to their clients,” he said, “but I want to be of service to transportation in the broadest policy sense of the term, particularly to safety to a new rural view of America and, hopefully, to a new urbanism, but I haven’t quite sorted out what that’s all going to be.”