Senate, House Set Conference Panel to Resolve Differences in Highway Bill

The 47-member House and Senate conference committee set up to produce a compromise transportation bill has scheduled its first meeting for May 8, but contentious issues have surfaced already that could delay or sink the effort.

American Trucking Associations and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association are at odds over the bill’s proposed mandate for electronic onboard recorders on trucks and quickly let conferees know where they stand.

“Clearly, these devices lead to greater compliance with maximum driving limits — which is very good for the trucking industry as a whole and highway safety,” ATA President Bill Graves said in an April 25 statement.

Graves urged the conferees to accept the EOBR mandate contained in the Senate transportation bill.

The same day, OOIDA Executive Vice President Todd Spencer sent a letter to Senate conferees saying a mandate would be a costly burden with no proven safety benefit and that EOBRs “raise serious concerns about privacy and invoke ‘big brother’ imagery.”

There are 14 Senate conferees led by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.), respectively, the chairwoman and ranking minority member of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

The House has 33 conferees, led by Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) and the committee’s ranking minority member, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.).

The Senate’s two-year bipartisan transportation reauthorization bill, passed in March, will serve as the outline for conference committee deliberations (4-23, p. 1).

The House could not agree on a transportation bill, so Republican leaders there pushed through a temporary funding extension that is being used as the vehicle for a conference committee to address reauthorization. 

Republicans attached two provisions to their new temporary funding extension — to support highway and transit programs through Sept. 30 — that are so controversial Senate conferees last week were distancing themselves from them.

One provision would mandate construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline to carry crude oil extracted from Canadian tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast. President Obama and most Senate Democrats oppose the pipeline.

The pipeline is such a contentious issue that Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), a conference committee member and one of the few Democrats supporting Keystone, issued a statement through a spokesperson saying he would not block a transportation bill to get the pipeline.

“Senator Baucus will not put more than 1 million American jobs supported by the highway bill in jeopardy unless he’s sure whatever Keystone measure proposed has the legs to pass Congress, be signed into law, and stand up to legal scrutiny, so we don’t end up delaying the project even further by getting it tied up in the courts,” the statement said.

Another provision attached to the House extension would dramatically cut back on the environmental review process for transportation projects, which prompted a second Senate conferee to distance himself.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Commerce Committee, issued a statement April 26.

“I want to make it clear that I cannot support the environmental provisions that have been attached to the surface bill by the House,” Rockefeller said. “These riders would jeopardize the tremendous bipartisan support this bill has had so far in the Senate.”

Despite substantial policy differences, some transportation advocates were optimistic about the conference.

“We think that they’re all going into this conference with the intention of getting something done,” said Brian Turmail, spokesman for the Associated General Contractors of America.

“We like to think that they’ll close the door, and the grown-ups will be in the room and they’ll do their job,” Turmail said.

Politically, many members of Congress would like to see a highway bill cobbled together by the end of June, he said. “Then they don’t have to worry about this until after the election . . . that’s tempting for a lot of folks.”