DALLAS -- State and city governments should look to their own resources for transportation funding and not expect the federal government under President Trump to come to the rescue, said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.
Alexander cautioned local officials from the Nashville area on Thursday not to expect much federal funding for the region's proposed 25-year, $6 billion transit program aimed at relieving traffic congestion.
"I recommend that you think big, think long term, and don't expect Washington, D.C. to pay for too much of it," he said. "That means paying for most of it with state and local dollars, which makes sense anyway."
Local governments are better equipped than federal bureaucrats to determine which transportation projects are vital and how they should be financed, Alexander said.
"I for one would prefer to pay a little more and have local officials decide what to do with it rather than sit stuck in a traffic jam on Interstate 24 waiting for someone in Washington to send me some money from New Jersey or New York to help pay for my local transportation needs," he said.
The region's share of the $12 billion per year dedicated to public transit in the five-year Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act isn't enough to make a dent in the overall cost of Nashville's transit push "even if the new president proposes a big, new infrastructure plan," Alexander said.
President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to move forward with a $1 trillion, 10-year infrastructure package within his first 100 days in office. He will have to get a lawmaker to introduce legislation and Congress will have to pass it. Trump said his American Energy & Infrastructure Act would leverage public-private partnerships and private investments with tax credit incentives to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investments over 10 years.
The $137 billion of tax credits would be offset with the incremental corporate and personal income tax revenues generated by the additional employment resulting from the surge in infrastructure construction, Trump said.
Trump may use an infrastructure program, which would be attractive to Democratic lawmakers, to sweeten other parts of his agenda that might not get so much support, said Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation.
"I expect President Trump to put infrastructure at the top of his to-do list," Davis said.
The focus on the first 100 days of a new presidential administration is artificial, Davis said.
"The real window is Inauguration Day through that period in late July or early August when Congress goes on recess," he said. "Basically the whole first term agenda is inextricably linked to the new president's first budget submission and how Congress goes along with it."
Shirley Ybarra, a former Virginia secretary of transportation who helped develop the state's first public-private partnership law in the 1994, is director of Trump's transportation transition team.
A signal that Trump is looking for bipartisan support for his infrastructure program is the selection of Martin Whitmer Jr., a Washington lobbyist with highway construction industry ties, to head the transition's transportation and infrastructure policy operations, Davis said.
"The thing to remember about Martin is not just that he was the Capitol Hill lobbyist for the road builders during their heyday in the late 1990s," Davis said. "It's that before that, he was a lobbyist for the Laborers Union. So he has argued from both sides of the labor-employer divide and knows the intersections of those arguments around job creation via increased infrastructure spending."
Whitmer was the Republican legislative representative for the Laborers' International Union of North America from 1994 to 1997, when he joined the American Road & Transportation Builders Association as vice president for governmental relations.
He later served as deputy chief of staff at the Transportation Department in the George W. Bush administration under Secretary Norman Mineta.
