U.S. Senate passes two year, stop-gap highway bill
March 14, 2012
Senate Passes 2-Year Transportation Bill
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
WASHINGTON — The Senate easily approved a two-year, $109 billion transportation and infrastructure bill on Wednesday, putting pressure on House Republicans to set aside their stalled version and pass the Senate’s before the federal highway trust fund expires at the end of the month.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, extolled the measure, passed on a bipartisan vote of 74 to 22, as “a jobs bill in the true sense of the word.”
“I hope the House will take this up and not listen to this shrill voice that makes up so much of the Republican caucus in the House,” he said.
But the nearly three million jobs expected to be “saved or created” by the measure largely come from construction jobs that stand to be lost if federally financed projects grind to a halt on April 1, when money from the highway trust fund could no longer be used.
That deadline appears to be weighing heavily on House Republicans, who initially had wanted to use their measure to change federal transportation policy fundamentally by linking infrastructure spending to the expansion of oil drilling from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to the outer continental shelf off the East Coast.
The five-year House proposal was stymied by a coalition of opponents in both parties, and Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, one of its initial backers, has all but abandoned it.
“As the speaker said, the plan as it stands right now is to let the Senate pass a bill and take up something that looks like it,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner, “unless the House coalesces around a better alternative, which we are actively pursuing.”
The Senate bill, written by one of the chamber’s most liberal Democrats, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, and one of its most conservative Republicans, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, consolidates 196 federal transportation programs to about a dozen, while giving more flexibility to the states to decide transportation priorities. But it largely keeps the scope of federal highway, transit and other surface transportation projects intact. Senators kept the duration of the bill short, to two years, because of the difficulty in paying for its programs as gasoline tax revenues slide.
President Obama, as well as highway and transit advocates, had pressed for a big, upfront increase in infrastructure spending to lift the economy and address the nation’s aging roads and bridges. But considering that House Republicans last year were considering a 35 percent cut to transportation spending, level funding may have been the best that advocates could hope for, said Rob Healy, vice president for government affairs at the American Public Transportation Association.
Rather than raising the gas tax, as many transportation advocates suggest, the Senate jury-rigged the bill with an array of revenue provisions, tapping a trust fund established to clean up leaking underground storage tanks and adjusting the way pension fund contributions and liabilities are calculated.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group, criticized the use of 10 years of revenue from such provisions to pay for a two-year transportation bill.
“That’s kind of how Congress is approaching every problem,” cobbling together short-term fixes without addressing long-term problems, said Jeff Shoaf, head of Congressional relations for the Associated General Contractors of America, which nonetheless strongly supported the bill.
Mr. Shoaf said the legislation would spur hiring in the construction industry, where unemployment hit 17.1 percent in February. With infrastructure spending stable for two years, construction firms should begin buying equipment and hiring permanent workers, he said.
“It’s not as long as we would like, but in aggregate the fact that we’re talking about a transportation bill at all is positive,” said Sean McNally, spokesman for the American Trucking Associations.