DALLAS — Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is barnstorming across eight states to deliver the message that road and bridge projects may be halted this summer if Congress does not act quickly to replenish the rapidly depleting Highway Trust Fund.
"Unless we do something to change the way we pay for transportation projects this country, the money just isn't there," Foxx said Tuesday in Nashville on his 13-stop "Invest in America, Commit to the Future" tour.
The Transportation Department said Tuesday that the highway account of the Highway Trust Fund had a cash balance of $8.3 billion at the end of March.
At current spending levels, Foxx said, the HTF will be depleted well before the current two-year highway funding law expires on Sept. 30.
"As early as August of this year, the fund that pays for building roads and the country's highways will essentially run dry," Foxx said.
"This is why I am out here, traveling the country and making the case to provide cities and communities who rely on good transportation infrastructure with the funding stability that can only be found in a multiyear transportation bill," he said.
Foxx's five-day bus tour promoting the Obama administration's proposed $302 billion, four-year surface transportation spending plan began April 14 in Columbus, Ohio, and will conclude Friday in Dallas.
His visits to manufacturers, bridges, freight facilities, and highway projects are an effort to raise awareness of America's infrastructure needs, Foxx said.
The proposed renovation of Nashville's Charlotte Avenue Bridge is an example of critical infrastructure needs that are being left undone due to a lack of investment, he said.
"I'm traveling across the country all week to highlight critical projects like this that we could address if we invest in America and commit to the future, because just doing more of the same isn't going to help us meet the transportation needs of the future," Foxx said.
The 50 year-old bridge and five others in Nashville carry 131,000 vehicles a day, but the Charlotte Avenue span was shut down three times in 2013 because of structural deterioration.
"Nashville can't afford to shut down a bridge because of crumbling infrastructure, but unless Washington begins to invest in transportation again, it won't be able to afford repairing the bridge either," Foxx said.
"We need to not only invest in America, but commit to the future," he said. "Not only rebuild and repair our roads and bridges, but re-imagine how we do it,"
At Foxx's stop at two bridges under construction over the Ohio River in Louisville, Ky., Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., said the highway funding fight in Congress has become a partisan battle.
"This is an actual physical traffic gridlock that we're going to see throughout the country, if we don't move forward," Yarmuth said of the bridge project. "We are very far apart. We are not just far apart, we're going in different directions here."
Kentucky Transportation Secretary Mike Hancock said all federally funded projects in the state would be affected in some way if Congress fails to act to renew the current two-year highway funding bill, Moving Ahead For Progress in the 21st Century.
MAP-21 provided more than $109 billion for surface transportation projects in fiscal 2013 and 2014, but required transfers from the general fund to the Highway Trust Fund to match expenditures.
The federal gasoline tax brings in about $32 billion a year, but that's $20 billion less than needed to keep highway spending at current levels. The 18.4 cents per gallon tax has not been raised since 1993.
The Congressional Budget Office said earlier this year that a six-year transportation bill would require $100 billion of general fund revenues because gasoline tax revenues are expected to stay stagnant. Congress has bolstered the HTF with more than $53 billion of general revenue since fiscal 2008.
