DALLAS – The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Thursday passed a six-year, $325 billion transportation bill after rejecting an amendment by Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., that would have increased the funding by more than $100 billion.
The committee adopted the bill on a voice vote after more than six hours of discussion.
Several technical amendments proposed by committee members will be added to the bill when it goes to the full House, said committee chairman Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa.
“There are still some issues to be resolved out there,” he said.
Garamendi’s amendment was one of 150 proposed by committee members during a vote on the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2015 (H.R. 3763), which is sponsored by Shuster and Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the ranking Democrat on the panel.
Garamendi said his amendment would have increased annual funding levels in the proposed bill to those in President Obama’s six-year, $478 billion Grow America Act (H.R. 2410). Garamendi requested a roll-call vote on his proposal, unlike the other members who briefly outlined their amendments but then withdrew them at Shuster’s request.
“If we hear all 150 of these [amendments], we’ll be here through Saturday,” Shuster said.
The rejected amendment would have provided an additional $54.8 billion for highways and $59.6 billion for public transit through 2021, Garamendi said.
“We are seriously under-investing in American infrastructure,” he said. “Why in the world, in the face of the extraordinary maintenance needs that have built up over the years, are we continuing a level of funding for the next six years that is really putting a brake on the American economy?”
Shuster said the funding to be provided by the bill is limited by the available revenue from the federal gasoline tax and other levies dedicated to the Highway Trust Fund.
Shuster’s proposal includes $258.2 billion for highways and $68.4 billion for transit through fiscal 2021.
Allocations to highway programs in the Senate’s DRIVE Act, (H.R. 22), total $269.5 billion with transit funded at $74.8 billion. HTF revenues for the first three years are supplemented in the Senate bill with $45.6 billion of revenue offsets, but the final three years are not funded.
“I’m hopeful that the Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee can come up with more revenues so we could increase the funding levels,” he said.
The allocations in the proposed transportation measure are based on a projection by the Congressional Budget Office for six years of funding at fiscal 2015 levels plus annual increases linked to inflation, he said.
“We’re funding highways and transit at baseline levels,” Shuster said. “Increasing those levels are just not possible.”
DeFazio said the measure is “a darn good piece of work” but agreed with Garamendi that the proposed funding was not robust enough.
”Unfortunately, this bill doesn’t provide the level of investment needed to rebuild or repair our crumbling roads, bridges, highways, and transit systems,” DeFazio said. “However, it includes a critical provision that would allow for automatic adjustments and increased investments if more money flows into the HTF than expected.”
The small annual funding increases in Shuster’s bill will likely fail to keep pace with the Consumer Price Index as well as projected increases in roadbuilding materials over the next six years, said the Transportation Construction Coalition.
“As a result, the legislation would support less highway, bridge, and transit improvements in the future than the current short-term extension is delivering today,” the advocacy group said Wednesday in a letter to Shuster and DeFazio.
A six-year reauthorization of federal transportation funding would provide more certainty for project planners but the proposed House bill falls short of what is needed, said Michael Melaniphy, president of the American Transportation Association.
“The program funding levels are not sufficient to adequately address the $86 billion state-of-good-repair backlog as well as the future demand facing our communities,” he said.
