DALLAS -- Democrats want more robust transportation funding than the $325 billion in a six-year bill introduced in the House on Oct. 16, according to briefings over the weekend by the minority staff of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
The committee is scheduled to meet Thursday to vote on the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2015 and any amendments. The bill is sponsored by Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., chairman of the T&I Committee, and Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the ranking Democrat on the panel.
The bill would essentially maintain the current funding level plus inflation through fiscal 2021. The current 90-day extension of federal funding approved by Congress in late May will expire on Oct. 29. The $8.1 billion transferred into the Highway Trust Fund by the short-term fix is expected to support project reimbursements to states until late November.
House Democrats appear to be balking at the bill’s proposed six years of funding, which would be more than $10 billion below the levels provided in the DRIVE Act that the Senate passed in late July, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association said Monday after hearing the plan’s details from the T&I Committee’s minority staff.
“While the STRRA is a bipartisan product, Democratic committee staff made it clear to ARTBA and other participants in a briefing session on the bill that they do not support the bill’s investment levels and want greater highway and public transportation funding increases,” the transportation advocacy group said.
Nineteen Democratic governors on Monday sent a letter to House and Senate leaders asking for an increase in federal transportation funding that they said was needed to revitalize the state-federal relationship.
State governments do not have the fiscal resources to do the job, the governors said.
“The federal government is indispensable to this effort and must bring additional resources to the table,” they said in the letter from the Democratic Governors Association. “The current level of funding is insufficient to invest in America’s infrastructure in a way that strengthens our security and economy.”
Shuster’s bill 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 for highways with transit funded at $74.8 billion.
President Obama’s six-year, $478.3 billion Grow America Act (H.R. 2410) would provide $317 billion for highways and $114.6 billion for transit through 2021.
The conservative Heritage Action advocacy group is recommending House members reject Shuster’s proposal, said education coordinator Nicholas Barden.
“The fact that HTF outlays have exceeded revenues since 2001 is evidence that federal surface transportation spending is out of control and inefficient,” Barden said.
But the transportation proposal from Shuster and DeFazio is “more responsible than the Senate bill,” which fully funds only the first three of the six years with $45.4 billion of revenue offsets to support gasoline taxes and other levies dedicated to the HTF, said Ed Lorenzen, a senior advisor at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
“First, it explicitly provides that none of the funding after 2018 would be available to be obligated unless Congress has passed legislation providing additional funding to ensure trust fund solvency,” he said.
“Second, the House bill has a provision reducing spending levels if gas tax revenues came in lower than current projections, which will avoid the shortfall from growing larger than currently projected,” Lorenzen said.
