Senators’ Highway Bill Plan Said to Include Freight Funds

This story appears in the June 6 print edition of Transport Topics.

A portion of the Highway Trust Fund would be dedicated exclusively to a national freight highway network under a bipartisan transportation reauthorization plan being drafted by four U.S. senators.

The Senate bill, to be unveiled this month, would give states a slice of Highway Trust Fund money to spend on projects that improve freight performance along the network, a Republican staffer working on the bill told Transport Topics.

“We didn’t want to just build more lanes that cars are going to use. We wanted to isolate the activities for purely freight purposes,” the staffer said of the freight provisions that the senators wrote into the impending bill.

The four legislators are Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and David Vitter (R-La.), all members of the Environment and Public Works committee.

Boxer is committee chairwoman, Inhofe is the highest-ranking Republican on the panel and Vitter is the ranking minority member on EPW’s Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee.

Baucus, chairman of the transport subcommittee, is also chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax legislation.

The four senators announced May 25 that they had reached agreement on a highway reauthorization bill they hoped to mark up by the July 4 congressional recess. They said the bill contained a freight provision, but did not reveal details at that time.

A Democratic EPW spokeswoman for Boxer and Baucus declined to address any of the details laid out by the GOP staff member.

However, the GOP staffer said the bill would make freight and its highway network a designated “core” program within the Federal Highway Administration. Core programs receive dedicated shares of trust fund revenue, the staff source said.

“Freight’s never had a dedicated prioritization within any highway bill since the beginnings of the program in 1956,” the staffer said.

Currently, there are nine core programs, among them, safety, bridges and the environment. The Senate bill would consolidate existing freight programs within FHWA and the Department of Transportation into the core freight program.

The Senate staff source also said that the senators did “not want to draw a map,” so, DOT would design the freight highway network. The network would be smaller but not limited to the interstate system and would be akin to what trucking and others have called “critical freight corridors.”

The senators are writing the criteria that would govern which projects could be financed with freight-designated trust fund money, the source said.

“Everything’s got to be tied to increasing freight performance,” the source added.

The states, not DOT, would choose which projects to spend their freight dollars on, but would have to meet “performance targets” for improving freight mobility, the GOP staff member said.

The staffer said states could spend the freight-related money on such projects as truck parking, truck turn-around lanes, intelligent transportation devices targeted to trucks, and highway truck lanes.

The senators have not yet designated what percentage of trust fund revenue would go to the freight program, the Senate staffer said.

In all, the Senate bill would authorize $339 billion in transportation spending over six years. It is unclear, however, whether Congress can agree on a six-year spending plan.

Oklahoma newspaper Tulsa World reported June 1 that Inhofe said the Senate bill he is working on would “end up a two-year bill” because there is no money for a six-year plan.

Boxer has said Congress could pass a six-year bill on the policy portions of reauthorization but fund it for only two years.

Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has pledged to write a six-year bill that depends only on trust fund money, but no additional money from the government’s general revenues.

Peter Gatti, executive vice president of the National Industrial Transportation League, said the freight-plan news is “encouraging and is something that certainly from our perspective is overdue.”

Like others, however, Gatti said the key to reauthorization is finding transportation funding sources. The Chamber of Commerce and American Trucking Associations support increased fuel taxes but Mica does not.

ATA spokesman Sean McNally also called freight details from the Senate draft bill encouraging.

“ATA welcomes the progress the Senate is apparently making in recognizing the importance of freight transportation to our country and its economy,” McNally said.

He also said, however, that while ATA supports the user-pay concept by which trucking firms pay into the trust fund via fuel and other levies, the trucking industry wants trust fund money to go to highways, not things such as rail projects.

In the Senate bill, Highway Trust Fund revenues designated for the freight core program could be spent only on highways and only to facilitate truck travel, not for automobile travel, the GOP staff source said.

Other transportation groups that have called for national freight programs include the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and the American Road and Transportation Builders Association.

“ARTBA has long-advocated that a federally led, national goods movement strategy be included in the next highway and transit authorization bill,” said spokesman Matt Jeanneret.

The road builders testified before a House panel in March that to help pay for transportation improvements, a federal excise tax should be assessed on the value of services provided by trucks.