WASHINGTON — Congress only has a very small window of time early next year to approve a multi-year transportation bill or it will risk losing the opportunity to do so for another two years, congressional aides said at a meeting here yesterday.
Any delay in congressional action could sideline legislation until after the 2012 presidential election cycle, House and Senate staffers said at a public-private partnership conference hosted by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association. It also could jeopardize the current federal system for transportation funding, the centerpiece of which is the Highway Trust Fund that relies upon gas tax revenue rather than the appropriations process.
House and Senate lawmakers have already given themselves until after this November’s elections to tackle what has become a politically thorny transportation reauthorization bill. That bill would replace the six-year authorization that expired last September.
Only one reauthorization proposal has surfaced so far — a bill introduced last summer, by House Transportation Committee chairman James Oberstar, D-Minn. — and it was supported by the committee’s ranking Republican John Mica of Florida. The Obama administration has promised to unveil its priorities for reauthorization soon.
But the future of any legislative proposals is probably dependent upon lawmakers being able to agree on a funding source to either replace or augment the fuel taxes that generate revenues for federally subsidized, state-run transportation projects. Those taxes have increasingly failed to keep up with rising highway and bridge construction costs.
Popular options for new funding include raising fuel taxes and pegging them to inflation. But it is widely believed that President Obama and tax-resistant lawmakers would block such an attempt, especially during a time of high unemployment.
Stuck in a political bind over the funding issue, Congress has opted to transfer money from the Treasury into the highway fund to keep transportation projects moving until at least the end of this year. But that could be a dangerous move, because it signals that highways and bridges are better paid for with run-of-the-mill federal funds, like other public-use sectors that are at the mercy of annual appropriations, aides said.
If the House and Senate approve one more funding transfer, they could lose political support for the firewall, according to James O’Keeffe, a Republican aide for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “We need to be extremely careful what we do,” he said.
To protect the firewalled funding system, legislators may need to re-evaluate all programs and move some of them into the annual appropriations process, said Jim Tymon, a Republican aide for the House Transportation Committee, though he acknowledged that is “not a real popular” proposal.
When the reauthorization bill does eventually pick up steam in the House and Senate, it could be shaped into a more privatization-friendly piece of legislation, aides said.
“You’re going to see Republicans push pretty hard … to really beef up the innovative financing side of what we already have” in the Oberstar bill, Tymon said. That could mean they will push to expand a popular low-interest federal loan and credit-assistance program that frequently supports toll projects, allow states to toll-finance new construction on Interstate highways, or establish a national transportation bank, he said.
Democrats would be on board with some of those efforts, said Jim Kolb, Democratic aide for the House Transportation Committee. “There are some real opportunities to expand congestion pricing” in the bill, especially for metropolitan areas, he said.
