Senate Focuses on Transportation System’s Funding Crises
The Senate’s top financial experts this week turned the spotlight on the funding crisis facing the nation’s transportation system but revealed little to address immediate or long-term shortfalls that already are halting planned highway projects.
In the short-term, the Highway Trust Fund needs $10 million to keep it solvent through the calendar year and
$8 billion to get it through fiscal year 2015, which begins Oct. 1, Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said at a May 6 committee hearing.
Without the money, as many as “6,000 projects grind to a halt, putting many thousands of construction workers out of a job and causing what I call traffic migraines from one end of the country to the other,” Wyden said.
The committee’s ranking member, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), said he wants to “preserve the user-pays system and prevent our federal infrastructure programs from becoming another tax extender, dependent every year or two on an infusion of cash from the general fund of the Treasury.”
Some 87% of the revenue flowing to the trust fund is from the federal tax on diesel and gasoline. But since 2008, Congress has transferred $54 billion from the general fund to keep the trust fund solvent.
Hatch and other committee members did not say if they would support higher fuel taxes.
Among the witnesses at the hearing was Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which is scheduled to mark up a new transportation reauthorization bill next week, she said.
EPW writes the highway portion of the bill, and the Commerce Committee oversees the transit and safety portions, but it is the Finance Committee that must figure out how to pay for the transportation plan.
“Our bill would be current levels plus inflation,” Boxer said.
The existing transportation spending law, MAP-21, expires Sept. 30.
Boxer said she shares Hatch’s view that highway funding should be a user-pays method and that she favors the approach Virginia adopted last year, which shifts state gasoline tax from a per-gallon tax at the pump to a wholesale tax regularly adjusted for inflation.
Committee member Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said he was distraught that Congress had waited so long to address the funding crisis. He added that it was urgent to do so immediately because Congress is on vacation in August, when the trust fund is expected to fall into the red.
At the hearing, a panel of witnesses addressed how private investment could help support the transportation system.
Congress and the White House have expressed a heightened interest recently in enabling public-private partnerships for infrastructure projects.
