Congressional negotiators agree on 5-year highway bill

The $305 billion transportation reauthorization is smaller than many transportation advocates sought and doesn’t resolve problems with the Highway Trust Fund and user fee collections.   House and Senate negotiators have issued a conference report bridging the differences between surface transportation bills in their respective chambers. The new bill – Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act – now goes to both bodies for a final vote.
   The $305 billion reauthorization legislation includes $253 billion over five years for highway and bridge infrastructure, and transit. The rest of the money is for auto and motor carrier safety, hazardous material safety, and passenger rail programs. The bill also includes a provision to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, which was shuttered this summer when Congress allowed its authorization to lapse.
   FAST includes a first ever dedicated freight program with $6.3 billion of formula money going states for freight projects and a $4.5 billion competitive grant program for nationally significant projects, $500 million of which can be used for non-highway mode improvements. And it creates a federal multimodal freight policy and strategic plan to better coordinate freight transportation.
   The bill would cover obligations of the Highway Trust Fund through fiscal year 2020 by using $70 billion in controversial offsets from other parts of the budget. 
   Congress is in a race against time to approve the FAST Act because the latest temporary funding extension expires on Friday.
   The Hill newspaper reported that House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is confident there will be majority agreement in both chambers to achieve passage of the FAST Act. Congress has been using stop-gap extensions, sandwiched around the two-year MAP-21 reauthorization, to fund transportation in the short term, but states have complained that it’s difficult to plan large projects in the future without greater funding certainty.
   Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said he would vote against the conference report because of what he calls “irresponsible” funding methods.
   “As a strong supporter of investment in our nation’s transportation systems, I deeply regret that I cannot support the final transportation conference report,” Carper said in a statement. “While the proposal includes some good transportation policies, the way the bill is paid for is simply irresponsible. Rather than leading, Congress is passing the buck by using a grab bag of budget gimmicks and poaching revenues from unrelated programs for years to come in order to pay for today’s transportation needs.
  “This bill sets a terrible precedent,” he added. “It sets bad transportation policy that undermines the user-pays principle, which has been the bedrock of investment in our nation’s highway and transit systems for more than half a century. And it sets bad fiscal policy that will actually increase our deficit in the long run.
   “Congress has missed an opportunity to pay for this bill honestly by raising transportation user fees, simply because we lack the courage to ask those who use our nation’s transportation system to pay a little more for its upkeep and expansion.”
   The Highway Trust Fund does not have enough of a balance on its own to repay states for the federal share of construction because inflation has eroded the purchasing power of the motor fuel tax, which hasn’t been raised since 1993, and more efficient cars means fewer gallons of gasoline are being purchased on a relative basis.
   The bill is smaller than many transportation advocates sought. FAST maintains current spending on highway repairs and upgrade, but there is not enough money included to reverse the backlog of projects in recent years as more roadways deteriorate or become congested.
   Other aspects of the bill favored by the goods movement sector include a requirement to redesignate the National Highway Freight Network with more than 41,500 miles every five years, requiring states to have their own freight plans to be eligible for federal money, and expanding port eligibility in the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program.
   The combined bill includes provisions aimed at streamlining project delivery and consolidating some permitting regulations, similar to what the Obama administration wrote into its GROW America proposal.
   Other provisions call on the Department of Transportation to establish a working group and collect additional freight data on an annual basis to help freight planning nationwide. The bill also aims to improve freight planning efforts on a multimodal basis.
   States are also granted more flexibility through consolidation of state trucking enforcement grants issued by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
   Trucking reforms address shortcomings of the Compliance, Safety and Accountability program and how motor carrier scores are used to evaluate motor carriers for hire. The bill includes new incentives for motor carriers to adopt innovative safety technologies and practices and it establishes a pilot program to address the driver shortage by allowing qualified current or former members of the armed forces who are between 18 and 21 to operate a commercial vehicle in interstate commerce. 
   For railroads, the bill consolidates rail grant programs and cuts red tape for infrastructure and safety programs, and accelerates the delivery of rail projects by reforming environmental and historic preservation review processes.
   Dedicated funding and financing that can provide about $2 billion in relief for implementation of Positive Train Control, a wireless communication system that can override a conductor to slow or stop a train to prevent an accident, is also included in the bill. An extension of the original Dec. 31 deadline for railways to implement Positive Train Control until 2018 at the earliest was included in a previous short-term highway extension passed at the end of October.
   The FAST Act also closes a potential loophole in DOT regulations related to thermal blankets on tank cars carrying flammable liquids.
   Removed from the final bill was a measure supported by major retailers for ports to report performance metrics to Congress as a way of identifying potential cargo bottlenecks.
   “If there is one thing most Americans can agree on is that many of our road and bridges are crumbling,” Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee said in a statement. “This bipartisan agreement provides states and cities with the long-term resources they need to fund critical transportation projects, while also improving vital highway safety and consumer protection measures.”