Senate to Unveil Transport Bill as Hearings Focus on Funding

This story appears in the May 12 print edition of Transport Topics.

WASHINGTON — Senate leaders said late last week that a six-year transportation reauthorization bill that would maintain current spending levels will be introduced May 12.

The May 8 announcement from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), made as Transport Topics went to press, came amid several hearings that increased anxiety over the transportation funding crisis.

Boxer, chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the bill would create jobs, provide funding certainty for the states and create “a formula-based freight program to improve the movement of goods on our surface transportation system.”

The announcement provided no details about the program, but the committee would begin its public debate at a May 15 meeting.

The announcement said that Boxer and three key lawmakers on the committee agreed the only spending changes from current levels in their bill would be for inflation.

The three are Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), ranking member on the committee; Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of EPW’s Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee; and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), subcommittee ranking member.

If the bill wins approval, the measure would replace MAP-21, the two-year spending authorization law that expires Sept. 30. That law had annual spending levels of about $109 billion.

It would fall to the Finance Committee, though, to find the money to pay for a new MAP-21. Last week, senators at a hearing painted a bleak picture of the growing crisis.

The Highway Trust Fund needs $10 billion to keep it solvent through the calendar year and $8 billion more to get it through fiscal year 2015, Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said at the May 6 hearing.

Most of the money in the trust fund comes from gasoline and diesel taxes, but as vehicles become more fuel-efficient, the revenue hasn’t been sufficient.

Without the infusion of 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.

Carper also sits on the Finance Committee, and in a statement distributed at the hearing, he said that “without a federal partner, 21 states plan to cut back on their capital investment program in 2014 and 2015, and eight more are rebalancing their investments from more expensive long-term capital projects to less expensive planning and maintenance projects.”

The trust fund is expected to be insolvent in August, when Congress is on vacation, but lawmakers lack the “will” to address revenue options, including higher fuel taxes, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said. 

Rockefeller sits on the Finance panel and is chairman of the Commerce Committee, which held its hearing last week. It included testimony from Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who discussed the four-year, $302 billion funding proposal that President Obama recently proposed.

Obama’s plan would be paid for via corporate tax reform and such mechanisms as lifting the federal ban on tolling interstate highways.

Allowing states to toll the interstates would be a “useful tool” to fund infrastructure projects, Foxx said at the May 7 hearing.

Giving states the option to toll interstates improves conditions on highways and relaxes the need to construct new ones. Also, if tolls are priced based on traffic volume, they could reduce congestion, Foxx said.

If the administration’s plan is enacted, tolling could proceed if a governor requests it and DOT signs off, he said.

“We believe that having the tool available is useful, but … it is not a wholesale solution to the transportation challenges we face,” Foxx said in response to questions from Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.).

However, Fischer said she was unconvinced the administration’s proposal would “meet the goal” to finance highway projects. She also said that truckers “really are hit hard on toll payments because, a lot of times, they pay that out of pocket.”

Despite heated rhetoric about the need to find money to support the nation’s highway and transit systems, no Senate leader has presented a plan for raising revenue.

Finance’s ranking member, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), said at the hearing that 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.”

Hatch did not say if he would propose or support an increase in the primary user-pays system — the fuel tax.

Eighty-seven percent of the revenue in the trust fund comes from the 18.4-cent gasoline tax and 24.4-cent diesel tax, but the revenue stream has not kept pace with the cost of maintaining the transportation network.

Since 2008, Congress has transferred $54 billion from the general fund to keep the trust fund solvent, according to testimony presented at the hearing by the Congressional Budget Office.