Trucking May Face Trade-offs

By Sean McNally, Senior Reporter

This story appears in the Nov. 10 print edition of Transport Topics.

Barack Obama’s election as president last week could lead to more transportation spending, but at the cost to trucking of more stringent regulations and White House support for labor legislation unfavorable to business, industry officials said.

However, despite a push from labor for legislation to make union organizing easier, one key business leader said that, in the interest of pulling the economy back to its feet, the Democrats may have to delay attempts to fulfill labor’s agenda, while focusing immediately on a stimulus spending package.

Economic recovery is the new administration’s top priority, and Obama planned to meet with his economic advisers Nov. 7. He was expected to announce key cabinet nominees quickly and on Nov. 6 chose Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D) as his chief of staff.

“I think they are fully committed to addressing the nation’s infrastructure,” said Tim Lynch, senior vice president of federation relations and strategic planning for American Trucking Associations.

Obama endorsed infrastructure spending as a way to jump-start the economy during his campaign, proposing an infrastructure bank and a fund aimed at creating jobs through infrastructure projects.

“I think we have to rebuild our infrastructure. Look at what China’s doing right now,” Obama told MSNBC before the election. “They are preparing for a very competitive 21st century economy, and we’re not.”

“Obama has been a pretty strong advocate for rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, including our roads,” said Greg Cohen, president of the American Highway Users Alliance. “So, I think there will be a pretty serious effort to invest.”

Obama indicated he would be open to running a budget deficit to pay for the increased spending.

“If you’re going to run deficit spending, then it better be in rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our sewer lines, our water system [and] laying broadband lines,” he said.

Lynch and others said, however, that the state of the economy may limit funds available for spending on roads and bridges.

To bail out financial firms, the Bush administration has added hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit, which will “squeeze the availability of other resources,” including spending on highways, Lynch said.

Jack Schenendorf, a Washington attorney and the vice chairman of the national commission on the nation’s infrastructure needs, told Transport Topics, “the economic crisis and the steps that we’ve taken to date and the steps that we take in the future are going to determine, in part, what the federal budget looks like and what kind of room there is for spending.”

Among the possible transportation secretaries who would implement Obama’s transportation agenda are Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, Oregon Reps. Earl Blumenauer and Peter DeFazio, Wisconsin Transportation Secretary Frank Busalacchi and Steve Heminger, executive director of the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Beyond fiscal concerns, a hidden cost of infrastructure improvements could be increased regulation or labor law, which trucking opposes, industry officials said.

With Democrats in the White House and controlling Congress, “it will be more difficult to advance certain business priorities and much harder to stop some anti-business measures,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said Nov. 6.

Donohue noted that organized labor and trial lawyers have a “long list of items” that “should alarm every business, small and large.”

Measures that unions are expected to press include the “Employee Free Choice Act,” known as “card check,” which would allow unions to organize companies if a majority of employees sign union membership cards, rather than voting in a secret ballot.

“Our top priority is passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that will restore workers’ freedom to bargain for a better life,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said.

The House passed the measure last year but could not overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate, which Obama voted to end.

However, Donohue said the administration’s focus on the economy could delay some of the more controversial items.
“I don’t think that you can make a very rational argument for dropping employee free-choice deal on top of a stimulus program,” he said, adding the card-check legislation “both real terms and perception would have serious implications on the creation of jobs and the stability of the economy.”

Schenendorf said the Obama administration and Congress might target transportation in climate-change legislation.
“Transportation is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and how this transportation reauthorization and climate-change legislation are going to intersect, I think, is an open question and one that Congress and the administration will have to grapple with,” Schenendorf said. Donohue said he is worried about the new Democratic government moving aggressively on global warming, particularly given the weakness in the economy.

The Chamber of Commerce believes, he said, that it is important “that we don’t create a particularly difficult question on global warming and climate change by giving the Environmental Protection Agency carte blanche to run around and drive unbelievable cost increases for every industry in this country.”

Another potential roadblock to added highway and bridge spending could be mass transit. Cohen said environmental groups and “other more left-wing-type groups and liberal-type groups want a piece” of the federal infrastructure pie and may push Democrats to fund highway alternatives such as mass transit.