Senate Focused on Multiyear Highway Bill

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Senator Orin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, speaks during a Senate Finance Committee markup session on health care revision in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009. Baucus will seek to make insurance more affordable for low-income people and may scale back a proposed tax on high-end health plans to win support for an overhaul of the system. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg *** Local Caption *** Orrin Hatch

DALLAS — Senate leaders are setting the stage for a battle with the House by preparing to vote next week of a multiyear transportation bill that would supplement the Highway Trust Fund with up to $90 billion of additional revenue to keep federal transportation funding at the current $54 billion per year.

That bill would be much longer than the five-month HTF fix the House voted for on Wednesday.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the Senate will extend funding for the HTF by five years with revenues from a variety of potential sources, including about $30 billion from changes in federal employee pension benefits and $10 billion by selling oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The offsets are in addition to revenues from the gasoline tax and other levies dedicated to the HTF that are expected to total $240 billion over the next six years.

The House bill would use $3.1 billion of airline passenger security fees and $5 billion from enhanced tax compliance.

"We're both going at it as best we can, and then ultimately we've got to resolve it between the House and Senate," Hatch told reporters on Wednesday. "And I think we will."

The current two-month patch adopted by Congress in May will expire July 31. The Transportation Department told state officials earlier this week that federal reimbursements for highway projects will end Aug. 1 when federal transportation spending authority expires unless Congress acts before the deadline.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and sponsor of the adopted HTF fix, said the Senate should pass the short-term extension without attaching an amendment to authorize the Export-Import Bank. The five-month fix will give Congress enough time to agree on a long-term transportation bill fully funded with revenue from tax reform, he said.

"The Senate should move quickly to adopt this extension, without any unrelated measures, so that we can provide some certainty and get to work on a multi-year plan," Ryan said.

A cloture vote has been scheduled in the Senate on Tuesday that would limit the time allotted to debate on the transportation proposal.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said he is confident a long-term bill will be approved next week by the Senate.

Inhofe's committee in June unanimously approved the Drive America Act sponsored by him and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the panel. The bill, S. 1647, would provide $277 billion of federal highway funding over six years.

"I anticipate that we will have actually passed in the next few days a long-term, maybe a six-year highway reauthorization bill," Inhofe said in the Senate on Wednesday.

There is no conflict with the House despite the competing HTF proposals, Inhofe said.

"We'll go to conference with the House and it will be business as usual," he said.

The Drive America Act would provide $14 billion of transportation spending between the expiration of the current two-month HTF extension on July 31 through the end of fiscal 2015 on Sept. 30, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. The measure would provide $43 billion of highway funding in fiscal 2016, with annual funding rising to $48.3 billion by FY-2021.

The highway safety portion of a multiyear transportation bill was approved Wednesday by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. The Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee is responsible for the public transit portion of the transportation bill, which will add $60 billion or more to the cost of a six-year bill.

Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-N.D., said the Senate next week will put an end to the lengthy series of short-term HTF extensions.

"We've got a lot of work to do when we reach the floor, but I hope that we can produce a multi-year highway bill that will get us away from six-month and one-year extensions," Thune said.

Before the House voted Wednesday in favor of the five-month extension, it rejected a proposal by Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and four other Democrats to replace the extension bill with newly introduced H.R. 3064, an altered version of President Obama's $478 billion, six-year Grow America Act that DeFazio introduced in May as H.R. 2014.

The revised proposal would supplement the HTF during the first two years with $41 billion of revenues from new restrictions on corporate tax inversions.

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