Congress considers 2-month extension for transport programs

Authorization for surface transport programs faces a May 31 deadline for renewal as the Highway Trust Fund balance dwindles.    Authorization to fund improvements for the nation’s highways is set to expire in two weeks without congressional action. On Friday, House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster, R-Pa., offered a bill to temporarily extend surface transportation authorization to July 31. Similar legislation was dropped in the Senate a day earlier by Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Tom Carper, D-Del., the top two Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee.
   House leaders had hoped to extend surface transportation programs through the end of the year, but said they needed more time to reach agreement on offsets in order to avoid increasing the size of the budget. The short-term extensions are being considered because there is no consensus in Congress on how to fund a long-term transportation bill.
   The insolvent Highway Trust Fund actually has sufficient resources to reimburse states for completed projects through the end of July, but will soon require stop-gap funding of about $11 billion from the general Treasury to augment user fees collected at the pump and meet funding obligations to states through December. 
   The Ryan-Shuster bill does not seek counteracting cuts elsewhere because there is enough money to carry the highway program for an extra two months, but some states have already begun to hold off on starting new projects because of the uncertainty surrounding future funding.
   Legislation extending the government’s authority to spend money on surface transportation programs for another eight months was enacted last summer. The measure included an $11 billion transfer from the General Fund paid for by increasing customs duties, moving money from another account and deferring tax-free contributions for corporate pension reserves to the government ends up with more tax money. In the last six years, Congress has voted for multiple short-term extensions for various transportation authorizations.
   About $40 billion a year is spent from the HTF to help states pay for highway maintenance and new construction.
   Transportation and freight advocates, as well as many lawmakers, are interested in a multi-year surface transportation bill that includes a sustainable source of funding for the HTF. 
   Bailing out the Highway Trust Fund is necessary because demand for construction projects exceeds revenues, which come primarily from motor fuel taxes and are in decline as Americans drive less and use more fuel-efficient cars. The gas and diesel tax is a fixed amount per gallon and hasn’t been raised in 22 years. Inflation has eroded nearly 40 percent of its value, which means money to fund projects doesn’t go as far as it once did. A gallon of regular gas in 1993 cost $1.12 and today costs $3.50, but the gas tax remains the same — 18.4 cents.
   Various proposals to raise the gasoline and diesel taxes do not have enough support in an ideologically divided Congress, with some opposing the idea of increasing the size of government without appropriate offsets and others worried about the financial burden on their constituents.
   Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s solution for paying for infrastructure upgrades, as outlined in its GROW America Act, is for a one-time windfall of more than $150 billion associated with corporate tax reform that is expected to encourage U.S. companies to bring home untaxed foreign earnings. The Obama bill is for $478 billion over six years. There are several bills in Congress that also would use “repatriated” corporate profits to fund infrastructure, although most experts don’t believe tax reform legislation will go anywhere soon given the current political climate.
   It has become standard operating procedure on Capitol Hill to deal with transportation with short-term patches — proverbially kicking the can down the road — while deferring decisions on long-range legislation that would provide funding certainty to states so they can move ahead with large projects on the drawing board.
   “That can has got a lot of dents it’s been kicked so many times,” Chris Spear, vice president of legislative affairs for the American Trucking Associations, said at press briefing last month.
   The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has indicated that it intends to mark up a six-year transportation bill this summer, but without a plan to come up with new sources of revenue to cover the gap between the HTF and ongoing needs the legislation is not likely to advance.
   Meanwhile, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is focused on Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization and has little interest in moving a bill until the funding situation is resolved, Joshua Schank, president of the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington think tank, said.
   Last week’s fatal derailment of an Amtrak passenger train is shining the spotlight on the state of aging U.S. transportation infrastructure and the limited federal investment the past 20 years to keep roads, bridges, airports, rail systems, and harbors in a state of good repair, let alone upgrade them to support greater economic activity and global competitiveness.
   There are about 140,000 bridges in the United States that need repair or replacement. About 40 percent of the nation’s highways are in poor condition and need major resurfacing or replacement, according to experts.
   The Amtrak accident was not caused by poor track conditions, but by excessive speed through a tight turn, according to initial findings by investigators. But critics note that positive train control, a collision avoidance system, had already been installed on the south-bound tracks, but not the north-bound tracks where the accident occurred, and that information technology is a form of infrastructure.
   Congress mandated that all passenger rail services and most freight trains install fully functioning positive train control by the end of 2015, although the cost will prevent many from meeting the deadline.
   Positive train control uses computers located in trains, Global Positioning System satellites, wayside signals, and centralized servers to establish continuous real-time communication over a digital network. Train crews receive visual and audible data on the status of approaching signals, the position of approaching switches, speed limits and approaching curves, and other speed-restricted zones. The train’s onboard computer constantly calculates and displays the train’s safe braking distance based on the train’s speed, length, weight and the grade and curvature of track. The system provides extra warning time for the engineer to bring a train to a safe stop. In the event that the engineer doesn’t respond to the display or audible warning, the onboard computer will apply the brakes and bring the train to a safe stop to prevent train-to-train collisions, over-speed derailments, unauthorized incursions into work zones and train movement through switches left in the wrong position. 
   “We should not be scrimping on investments in public safety,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
   Booker lamented the fact that the United States spends less than 2 percent of GDP on infrastructure and is now ranked 16th in the world by the World Bank after once being the leader in that category.
   “By withholding this investment…we are losing out on jobs. We are missing out on growth,” he said.
   Amtrak supporters say the railroad has not received adequate funding from Congress to support improvements that will increase safety, train speed and customer service, and attract more riders.
   “If we are stewards of American dollars, and caretakers of this great infrastructure we’ve inherited from our grandparents, we don’t want to pass it on to our children with an infrastructure debt. We want to make those investments and reap those dividends,” Booker said.
   Amtrak restored service Monday on the Northeast corridor between Philadelphia and New York after making repairs to the area damaged by the accident.