Several U.S. senators have criticized the Obama administration’s plan to use $4 billion to create a new national infrastructure bank to help finance transportation projects, questioning how the bank would operate and whether rural projects would lose funding to larger urban areas.
In its fiscal 2011 budget request, the Department of Transportation proposed dedicating $4 billion to a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, following on an unfulfilled request it made for an infrastructure bank last year.
“You might have changed the name of the program but the details remain the same. By that I mean there are no details,” Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) said at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing Thursday.
Bond said unless he is told how the new fund would be overseen, he would oppose DOT’s funding bill.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said that while he did not know all the answers, “the idea has been kicked around Congress for a long time.”
The administration is “trying to find ways to do all the things that we all want do to without raising the gasoline tax,” LaHood said. “We feel that the infrastructure bank is a way to do that.”
The fund would finance “big, significant projects that people don’t have the money for,” LaHood said, adding he envisions the government receiving proposals from states, and through the sale of bonds, the government would help states pay for the work.
By Sean McNally
Senior Reporter
