Highway Trust Fund
Floor Speech
Ms. NORTON. Oh, you would be the very first one given what you have done on this floor, and I am glad you mentioned some parts of the bill and its cost. Yes. Guess what? It costs money; it costs something to do transportation and infrastructure; but the administration has had many Members' support of bringing back untaxed funds abroad that want to come back and of using it for something that everybody is for.
I understand that our ranking member, Mr. DeFazio, has written Mr. Ryan of Ways and Means to ask for a joint hearing of our committee with the Ways and Means Committee so that we can work together, and there are rumors, because that is all we hear about of this bill these days, that there may be one in June. You will notice that that is after May 31.
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Ms. NORTON. Oh, you have made such an important point because you say, if not this, what?
The Democrats--we on this side of the aisle--are willing to sit down with you to come up with whatever bill we can compromise on. We just have to be shown a bill. The reason I am going to introduce the GROW AMERICA Act is so that we can begin there. Maybe they don't want that. Okay. Let's bargain down from there, but we can't do nothing. We can't go home and say, ``Well, we did nothing,'' and we certainly can't simply wait for our friends on the other side of the aisle.
Now, I want my friend from California to know that representatives of the states were in the House today and I went to say a few words to them. They were in one of our committee rooms--a group that calls itself the ``Big Seven.'' They were the leaders in the States. They were the Governors, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National League of Cities, the United States Conference of Mayors. They were begging for this bill, so they had their own meeting here.
I think that it behooves us to ramp up the pressure, we who are on the inside. When you see that those who represent the infrastructure we are talking about are on the Hill, pleading, without an answer from either side, well, our side is trying to answer; and because there is so much bipartisanship, there is just no reason that we shouldn't be sitting down and trying to figure this out.
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Ms. NORTON. I do. You talked about the project in your district, and that project with the crack in the road is emblematic of what is happening in the United States.
Mr. Garamendi, they can't even start on that repair because that is a major project. So another patch, as we call it, or short-term funding, means that the backlog of major projects remains. You can't start what America needs, which are major projects. If we could put them all here in this Chamber, they would pile up to the ceiling. They simply have to sit there with 6-month patches or even a 1-year patch. Yours is a major Federal highway, and California can't do anything about it.
I went to such a highway in my own city, and that is why I brought this poster. The Washington Post picked it up and says, ``Norton Uses Bridge to Make a Point.'' It is interesting. Although this bridge also has real defects, I was using it to make another point, that every form of transportation depends upon this bridge in the
Nation's Capital: the intercity buses; the intracity buses; the street car, if you are going to a major highway; the Metro--all of it comes to a head there.
A point that you touched upon, which is seldom made here, is a point I tried to make when I went to the H Street--or Hopscotch--Bridge, and that is that the failure to rebuild that bridge is keeping a complete overhaul of Union Station from occurring, not to mention a whole new community that would be built over it, because they can't move on those major economic development projects until the bridge is done, and it will take 5 years to rebuild that bridge.
So you see, Mr. Garamendi, we are not just holding up obvious infrastructure projects; we are holding up major economic development projects that simply can't get started until the roads and bridges are fixed.
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Ms. NORTON. So that we can get high-speed rail. So you can't get high-speed rail unless you dig down. You can't do that unless people can get over this bridge. You talked about billions of dollars of highway bridge and transit that is being held up. I don't even want to begin to try to calculate how much economic development that depends upon our fixing those major road projects is not getting done.
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Ms. NORTON. Well, again, Mr. Garamendi, you have my thanks, and you should have the thanks of this entire House. I am glad you closed with the program you did--you talked about the ports--because in the GROW AMERICA Act is a multimodal freight program. This is the first time it has ever been in the transportation bill.
Now, you gave an example: multimodal, because we are trying to make sure that rail and highway and port projects are coordinated together. That is the efficient use of all modes of transportation together. Here on the East Coast, The Panama Canal is coming and now you have every single port trying to get that business, and you have the private sector investing like mad in railroads because they want that business, and the buses want that business.
The private sector, Mr. Garamendi, is doing its job, but you can't, in fact, in the States do the ports and the freight all by yourself or with the private sector alone. And so this bill, the GROW AMERICA Act, brings it all together, gives us for the first time something that we have had in ground transportation, multimodal, but we have not had it in freight transportation so that those ports you are focusing on would grow, and we grow them here, just as you said, buying American.
I thank you once again for all you have done.
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Ms. NORTON. Again, I thank the gentleman for the leadership he has taken on not only this bill but on infrastructure in our country. I did want to say a few more words because in these last 6 days we can't leave words unsaid.
I want to say that what my chief frustration is--there is really no serious thinking going on in this House about ways to replace the highway trust fund except what is in the GROW AMERICA Act, and that, of course, would be for one 6-year period. The reason I bring this up is because I want the American people to help us think about what has happened to the highway trust fund. We have got to bring it together this time and grow America with repatriated taxes that would otherwise not be there.
But let's think of why we have to do that. The efficiency that we now have and we ought to be proud of that, but it means that that 1950s approach, which worked so magically, is now entirely out of date, and there have got to be other ways to fund transportation and infrastructure. I was very frustrated that in the last bill, we call it MAP-21, there were not even pilots to guide us, like the so-called VMT miles driven that all of us, even those of us who are in hybrid cars, those who therefore don't contribute as much on the present highway fund, would play our part.
We need to sit around a table right here in the House and figure out what to do in the long run because we didn't do that last July when this bill was extended. There are even some people talking about, well, it can go to July because it runs out in July. Yeah, it runs out in July, and then look what happens. Treasury funds will have to be transferred just to make sure that we keep level funding going, and that level funding, meaning just base funding, will mean that no new major projects will be started in the States because of what has come to be called lack of certainty. I know of no major project that can be finished in 6 months. If it takes you 2 or 3 years, leave alone the 5 years like my H St Bridge project I spoke about, then you don't start it at all. So the money just lies fallow. It goes to no good major need.
So who is to blame? They are going to look to us and say, What are you doing? That is why we are coming on this floor. They are going to look to us to stop doing the same thing over and over again and think of something that
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Ms. NORTON. Meanwhile, as you indicated, GROW AMERICA would be a way to do it for at least 6 years.
I went to speak with the various organizations representing the States that were here today. I had my staff look at what the States are doing. Frankly, I found the States in a desperate position. There are States that have already done gas tax increases or reforms of their own. You have got to be pretty desperate to raise your own tax and leave ours where it was 20 years ago.
Iowa, Wyoming, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, the District of Columbia, South Dakota, these State have nothing in common, except that they couldn't continue to go on without funding.
Six States are making progress on trying to raise their own gas tax in the absence of our doing something. Those States, in the same way, don't have anything in common. When I say ``making progress,'' it generally means one House has at least done it, and they are trying to get the other House to raise the gas tax. They are Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington State.
Then there are another seven States which are considering changes because they just can't wait any longer to get long-term projects going: Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Vermont.
When I came into the meeting today, there was someone from the South Dakota Department of Transportation speaking, and it was interesting because they raised the gas tax in South Dakota, a very red State, and it included an amendment also to raise the speed limit by 5 miles an hour. I think that would make it something like 80 miles an hour out there.
He said--and he just laughed at this--that, although they had raised the gas tax on the residents in the legislature, nobody talked about anything except the increase the speed limit. That is how little the notion that you shouldn't raise your gas tax had become in a State like South Dakota.
The States are way ahead of us and looking to us for leadership. These 6-month increments are the exact opposite of leadership--delaying, as I indicated before, Mr. Garamendi, billions of dollars of other infrastructure that the Federal Government wouldn't have to pay for often, that can't get done, like a road or a bridge. That is why I went to such an example in my own district.
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to submit for the Record a list of the top five critical infrastructure projects in my own district, the Nation's Capital. The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board has also written to this region's bipartisan delegation, and I would like to have its resolution also included in the Record.
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Ms. NORTON. I want to emphasize, as we approach the end, how little of a partisan problem we are talking about this evening. Republican Governors have signed the laws that I have referred to.
The committee--Mr. Garamendi will remember this--had Republican Governors, State department of transportation executives, cities, counties, regional councils, and the rest before us, and the notion of devolution came up.
This hearing was interesting because when devolution has come up, and devolution simply means that if States are raising their gas tax. Well, let's stop doing a Federal highway or surface transportation bill.
These States are raising their gas tax, and they are waiting for us to raise ours so that the partnership that is represented by State gas taxes and Federal gas taxes will remain whole until we find some other way to do this.
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