Sens. Barbara Boxer and James Inhofe worked hard to negotiate an agreement on transportation enhancement funding -- a deal now threatened by House Republicans. Photo: Transportation Issues Daily

Transportation Enhancements is the primary source of funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects. It comprises less than two percent of total federal transportation funds but has been a source of bitter contention, nearly derailing talks in the Senate. The two sides eventually made a deal under which TE is subsumed under the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement program’s “additional activities” category. Per that agreement, states can opt out altogether, and some road uses compete with bike and pedestrian projects for funding. An amendment to maintain some local control over the funds made it somewhat more palatable for advocates.

Sen. James Inhofe, the conservative top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, warned House members at the outset of the conference that “the conservative position is to pass this thing,” even if members are not 100 percent satisfied with the compromise. The changes to the enhancements program constituted “the most meaningful reform to conservatives” in the bill, he said.

Transportation conference chairwoman Barbara Boxer said today that lawmakers “have a chance” to make the bill longer than two years, as the Senate bill is written. She also said that 80 percent of the EPW Committee’s portion of the bill is not controversial and has been agreed to. According to Boxer, House Speaker John Boehner told her last night that he has instructed House negotiators to get a bill done.

Still, a staffer familiar with the ongoing conference talks has told Streetsblog that TE is again an issue of contention. Freshman Republicans have made a point of expressing their dissatisfaction that any funding whatsoever remains in the bill.

In addition to TE, Republicans took issue with one of the most popular bill elements among transportation reformers: the provision allowing for more flexibility for transit agencies in times of high unemployment. The Senate bill allows agencies in such cases to spend federal funds normally reserved for capital improvements on operations. GOP opposition to these programs is part and parcel of the urban/rural divide, according to Streetsblog’s source, who said some House members are bent on redistributing money from urban areas to rural districts.

It’s unusual for conferences to meet in public, and leaders have indicated that this won’t be the only meeting they have in front of television cameras. Still, the sausage-making always happens behind closed doors. Here’s what we’re looking for today:

Could the transportation bill be Rep. John Mica's downfall? Photo: Roll Call

Will anything come of it? “The first day will tell you exactly nothing,” Scott Slesinger, NRDC’s director of legislative affairs, told reporters last week. “You’ll walk out of there convinced that there’s no way they’re going to do a bill.”

In fact, the conventional wisdom right now is that this whole process will end in yet another extension, probably until the lame-duck session after the November election. But this conference committee could lay the groundwork for that bill. Both parties want to get a bill done, but Republican leaders are worried that their base will revolt at the sight of them negotiating with Democrats. So, in public they’ll be all hard-line rhetoric and uncompromising conservatism, and when the cameras are off they’ll horse-trade.

How strong is the Senate’s hand? The House has pretty limited leverage in this process because they didn’t pass a real transportation bill. The Senate is bringing to conference a bill that got a remarkable vote of confidence from senators across the political spectrum, and “the House sent over beach ball,” according to NRDC’s David Goldston.

“The House can’t figure out how to get even its own members together so they send these partial things over to the Senate to cause trouble,” said Goldston, “while the Senate has a bill that’s been passed by about three-quarters of the members of the Senate and was written by [Senators Barbara] Boxer and [James] Inhofe. The fact that Boxer and Inhofe were able to write a bill together is one of the least-appreciated stories of this Congress. So, peace breaks out but people say, ‘We’d rather continue to have war.’ That’s unfortunate.”

Photo: Familypedia

In another desperate attempt to push forward their fossil fuel agenda, House Republicans have indicated that even though they’ve been incapable of passing a transportation bill, they’re willing to go to conference committee and pass the Senate bill. All the Senate Democrats have to do in return is approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

Our sources had predicted the House GOP would pull something like this. This is the “shell” bill that the House was expected to present as a sort of placeholder to conference with the Senate bill, just to get something moving.

The House doesn’t have a prayer of passing a real bill to conference with the Senate bill, so they’re bringing an extension. That’s right — they’re bringing a 90-day extension to the Senate and saying, now we have to reconcile the differences between these bills. One of those bills is real legislation that includes real policy changes, and one is just a shell. But Republicans still hope they can negotiate changes in conference, even though they don’t have a bill showing the will of the House.

The Transportation Committee is drafting the extension/pipeline bill now. Sources say it will come to the floor the week of April 23.

It’s a mix of the best case scenario — getting to conference, one way or another, with the Senate bill — and the worst case scenario – holding the transportation program as ransom to get the pipeline rammed through. It’s the sort of nasty politics this Congress is known for.

Clearly, the House GOP leadership now wishes this whole transportation thing would just go away. They have egg on their faces from repeated failures to get even their own caucus on board with their drilling-and-driving plan, and they still have no idea about how to deal with it.

The House hasn’t been able to pass anything dealing with infrastructure, but they have passed three — count ‘em, three — bills to expand oil drilling. If there’s one thing Republicans can come together on, it’s oil drilling. Those bills don’t actually say anything about transportation (even though they were supposedly the foundation of the GOP transportation agenda).

It’s somewhat surprising that the House wouldn’t conference those bills with the Senate bill, instead of an extension. From what I hear, there’s no rule stopping them; it’s just that the Senate likely wouldn’t tolerate it. Experts say the House wouldn’t want to go to conference with no position on the transportation policies laid out in the Senate bill — but that’s exactly what they’re doing now.

One way or another, the next move on transportation will be close to no move at all. It will be some form of extending current law, perhaps with a few adjustments, until after the election. With any luck Congress will figure out a way to deal with the impending insolvency of the Highway Trust Fund, which will hit before the election, but it’s anyone’s guess whether or how they’ll do that.

Even though they just solemnly swore to attend to the transportation reauthorization in the next 90 days (and no more extensions!), the House is about to pretend to be way too busy with the budget to pass a real bill. It’s all for show, because really, if they had a game plan for transportation, they’d act on it. But there’s still too much infighting within the Republican Party to present a united front.

If the two houses do go to conference, it will still be a mess. With no House bill to work with, the two sides will have to negotiate everything from scratch. House Republicans won’t accept the bipartisan Senate bill without some face-saving policy changes. And even the Senate bill at this point is practically just an extension: If it becomes law June 30, it will only be in effect 15 months before a new law is necessary.

June 30 is the deadline, when the ninth extension expires. And with the two Houses wrangling in conference, it could easily go down to the wire again with both sides of the aisle accusing each other of jeopardizing 1.8 million jobs and strangling the transportation industry. It will seem as if there is no way to avoid such an outcome in the face of such monumental intransigence and political cat-fighting, but somehow they always figure out something.

And then there’s the budget Congress is so busy not passing. Sometimes Congress passes one, sometimes they don’t. The conventional wisdom is that this is going to be one of those years where they don’t. The Senate Budget Committee will pass one, against the wishes of Majority Leader Harry Reid, who won’t bring it up on the floor. They’ll just ignore House Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s budget, which would have cut transportation by 36 percent and would have almost certainly left nothing for high-speed rail, livability initiatives, or other reform priorities. Pretty much the only purpose the Ryan budget now serves is as an election-year talking point for Democrats to say what heartless monsters the deficit hawks on the other side of the aisle are.

In my conversations about the budget, speculation arose that the Supreme Court decision on the health care law could have some impact, as deficit projections would change if the law is struck down. It’s hard to say what that would mean for transportation, and it probably wouldn’t have much impact at all in 2013. But it’s a good reminder that in Washington, all things are connected.

Even if Congress never passes a real 2013 budget, they still need to decide on appropriations, which is essentially the same thing. The House will work on that for the next few months. The Senate probably won’t work very hard on it. No one expects spending to be decided until after Election Day.

See you next week.

The shift in driving habits has exposed the inadequacy of the federal gas tax to fund national transportation programs, and the need to shift away from road building. Graph adapted from the FHWA

It’s a new era for federal transportation policy, say the top New York City Department of Transportation officials tracking action on Capitol Hill. We just don’t know what kind of era it’s going to be.

“If this was 1996 or 1985 it would be pretty clear where we would go with federal transportation policy, with a few tweaks,” said DOT Director of Policy Jon Orcutt during a presentation at NYU’s Wagner School last night. “That’s not true today.”

Two changes are forcing a shift in transportation politics and policy at the federal level. The amount Americans drive has started to stall out. And earmarks have been transformed from political windfalls for powerful Congressmen to untouchable liabilities.

Linda Bailey, the federal programs advisor for NYC DOT, said that working for New York City has given her a new appreciation for the policy drawbacks of transportation earmarks for the localities receiving them. “You typically get $1 million for a $10 million project,” she said. “Somehow now you’re supposed to come up with $9 million to fund the rest of the project.” The city still has earmarked money from the last transportation bill, passed in 2005, sitting on the table, Bailey said.

But at the same time, the lack of a new transportation bill — Congress recently passed its ninth extension of that 2005 law, which expired in 2009 — is in part due to Congress members’ newfound opposition to directing federal dollars back to their districts.

“It’s thrown the whole formula out of the window, in terms of what you do politically,” said Orcutt. In particular, the end of earmarks has forced federal transportation policy to become more sharply ideological, whereas horse trading could paper over divides in the past. This year, for example, suburban Republicans helped kill the House of Representatives’ radical transportation bill, which would have eliminated dedicated funding for transit entirely. With earmarks, argued Orcutt, those same representatives might have been able to bring big projects to their districts even while cutting transit in the rest of their regions, and safely voted yes on the overall bill.

One in ten dollars in the last transportation bill was earmarked for specific projects, said Bailey. No earmarks at all were included in either the House or Senate proposals from this year.

Even as the elimination of earmarks complicates the path to passing a transportation bill, changes to the way Americans get around are challenging the very structure of federal transportation policy. Though federal transportation spending remains heavily focused on building highways, the growth in driving slowed considerably over the last decade, and actually declined in 2008 and 2009.

Adjusted for population growth, the trend is even more striking. According to a report from U.S.PIRG released today, the average American drove six percent less in 2011 than in 2004.

“Transportation is changing in this country,” said Orcutt. “Driving is leveling off. The federal program is really obsolete, in a way.”

The shift away from driving threatens the financial footing of the transportation system. The gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993, but for many of those years, the continued rise in mileage masked the erosion of the gas tax by inflation. Without that growth, the plummeting value of the gas tax — in constant dollars, the gas tax has fallen from 18.4 cents a gallon to only 11 cents – can’t fund what it used to.

That, the DOT officials argued, is why no one in Washington seems able to pass a significant new transportation bill. The House Republicans, led by Transportation Committee Chair John Mica, tried to cope with declining revenues by ending the funding of transit out of gas tax receipts, as well as trimming road spending by a smaller amount. That plan has gone nowhere in the House; Bailey said she’d heard that the Republicans only managed to find 180 out of the 218 votes they needed for Mica’s bill.

The Senate’s bipartisan transportation bill, which passed 74-22, cobbled together enough unrelated revenues to keep funding levels exactly where they were under the previous law. Those funds were only enough to last 18 months; a more fundamental rewrite of the law would be necessary almost immediately.

Though the Senate bill consolidates a number of federal programs, the DOT officials said the only truly significant change in it is the expansion of TIFIA, a federal loan program. TIFIA loans have been used to great effect in cities like Los Angeles, which are looking to stretch local revenues further, said Orcutt, but financing isn’t a replacement for funding. “At some point, you have to decide to spend more,” said Bailey. Similarly, Orcutt argued that public-private partnerships, sometimes touted as a new paradigm for transportation funding, “don’t really do anything if there’s not real money attached.”

Unfortunately, the political will to raise the gas tax is scarce. Bailey said she doesn’t see the current House Republicans approving an increase in the near future. The Obama administration, added Orcutt, hasn’t been any more receptive to increasing the gas tax, arguing in bad times that it would harm the economy and during the recovery that oil prices are rising too quickly.

In fact, both the Senate and House bills would mark the end of the transportation funding paradigm that has prevailed ever since the interstate system was created. Neither relied exclusively on the gas tax, meaning both abandoned the traditional “user-pays” philosophy that has guided federal transportation spending. It’s clear that the current era of federal transportation policy is coming to a close, but the next era can’t emerge until Washington is willing to find the money for the level of spending it demands.

General Contractors Association Managing Director Denise Richardson. Photo: GCA

Transportation infrastructure is big business. With tens of billions of dollars at stake, nobody tracks the financial health of the state’s transit and road systems more closely than the construction industry. And right now, the future of transportation funding in New York is hazy indeed.

Albany just passed a budget that lets the MTA move forward as planned with necessary repair and construction work, mainly by taking on billions in additional debt, including a $2.2 billion loan from the federal Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing Program (RRIF). But instead of providing stable new revenue streams to keep pace with the agency’s costs, the legislature and Governor Andrew Cuomo cut existing dedicated MTA taxes, leaving transit riders to the vagaries of the annual budget process. The state’s biggest highway project, the Tappan Zee Bridge, is hurtling forward despite the possibly illegal lack of a financing plan. And though New York-area representatives helped kill the House of Representatives’ singularly terrible transportation bill, Congress still hasn’t passed a new law to stabilize federal transportation funding.

“All this short-term thinking plays into what ultimately becomes a series of bad planning decisions, because everything is left until it’s a crisis.”

To get some perspective on the state of transportation funding in New York, we sat down with Denise Richardson, the managing director of the General Contractors Association. Representing the region’s heavy construction contractors, Richardson is a major voice for transportation investments. With experience in city and state government, including at the MTA, she’s a leading authority on the ins and outs of infrastructure. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Noah Kazis: Let’s start with the recent MTA capital plan deal. Your statement sounded like you’re happy construction is finally moving forward.

Denise Richardson: Well the whole situation with the MTA capital plan was made riskier because of the lack of movement on the federal transportation bill. Everything cascades. Given that so much of the MTA capital plan relies on getting approval from the federal government for the RRIF loan, had the legislature either not approved the bond cap increase or not approved the $770 million funding request, it would have put the whole capital plan at risk. It would’ve put the federal government in a position of being able to decline the RRIF loan, which would’ve been huge. But it also would’ve forced the MTA to go back and re-scope the capital plan, which would not have been good. The MTA spends a lot of time and thought scheduling their projects. It’s not a random act. When you have to go back and cut projects, it cascades for years to come. So we were very happy that the capital plan funding was approved intact.

NK: Speaking of years to come, how does the financing arrangement for this capital plan tee up what may be necessary for 2014?

DR: There has to be a very serious conversation about how to fund the MTA, which is part of the larger conversation about funding infrastructure nationally. We’re not the only place that’s having this debate. As we head into 2014 and the next MTA capital plan, we have to really talk about how we’re going to fund the MTA going forward.

This is a debt-laden capital plan. Everyone who follows the MTA knows that. To the MTA’s credit, what they’re doing is they’re paying off old debt while they take on new debt. The new debt has very favorable terms. Interest rates are as low as they’re ever going to be, so they’re swapping less favorable debt for more favorable debt. But it’s still debt and it still needs to paid. We have to look at a revenue source for the MTA that is stable, recurring and will be there.

NK: So what are the options you see on the table? It seems like the payroll tax is probably not going to be increased.

DR: We were watching the whole discussion about the payroll tax very carefully. Part of the issue with the payroll tax is a mindset that the MTA network should be paid for by its users, that the larger business community doesn’t benefit from the MTA network. I think if you look at businesses on Long Island and in Westchester, even if that business’s employees don’t necessarily ride the MTA to work, the fact that the MTA is there alleviates traffic congestion. If you look at property values in communities that are served by the MTA or have an express station, you see different property values than in communities not. There is an intrinsic value to that, that we, as a society, aren’t willing to acknowledge.

NK: So how do you capture that intrinsic value? Congestion pricing is back in the discussion –

DR: There’s a lot of merit to congestion pricing. If you look at other cities that have implemented congestion pricing, London and Stockholm come to mind, you don’t see articles about how it killed businesses and killed jobs. You didn’t find a massive number of businesses moving out of those cities. Here, congestion pricing got wrapped up in the whole outer borough-versus-Manhattan discussion. I live in an outer borough, so I can talk about this stuff.

My personal issue is that if you look at parking in Manhattan, most of the people who drive into work do not pay for their own parking. Their parking is paid for by their businesses, their businesses write it off. Believe me, if most people who drove into work every day in Manhattan paid for their own parking at $35 or $40 a day, we wouldn’t be having this discussion about congestion pricing. Let’s look at the real cost of driving to Manhattan.

Construction workers building the East Side Access tunnel into Grand Central. Photo: MTA

NK: Turning back to the current capital plan, what are the threats that could still derail it over the next two years? The federal government seems one.

DR: In the capital plan that ultimately got approved, the MTA assumed a stable level of federal funding, and I think that that was an appropriate assumption. If you go back about a year and a half ago, when they first put the capital plan together, they were assuming an increase in federal funding. I think the RRIF loan was a very creative way to get the funding that’s needed for East Side Access [which will connect the LIRR to Grand Central], because it’s the heavy railroad improvement program. So I think that the MTA capital plan, for the remainder of its term, is in good shape. It’s the next one we have to think about.

NK: You’re not worried about some version of the House proposal coming back to life?

DR: I think that the House never expected the amount of pushback nationwide, and from cities that you would not think of as being heavily transit dependent.

NK: It was something to watch.

DR: It was. I enjoyed it for a couple of reasons. First of all, I enjoyed it because the GCA was among the first to jump on the issue and talk to congressmen around the country. A lot of our members are national and international firms.

And you saw other places around the country that have primarily bus networks look at this and say, “Wait a minute, if we want to build a new depot and we want to apply for federal funding, we’re not going to get it.” So you saw this real grassroots movement.

From a democracy perspective, the House leadership, wrapping themselves in their Tea Party flag, said, “This is not what we want the federal government to stand for.” To see another group of people from all around the country say, “Well wait a minute, yes we do,” was a really effective use of government, because you had two very different views of what government is. And in the end, the House was forced to withdraw their proposal.

The fact that they have not been able to put forward a new version of a transportation bill is a tremendous disservice to everybody. I don’t know if by the time November comes that’s going to be a big election issue. But I would certainly think that people around the country would sit back and say, “This House that we elected two years ago, because we wanted a different philosophy of government, what have they really accomplished?” And I think it will be interesting to see that assessment.

NK: Can you explain, in concrete terms, why the short-term extensions pose a challenge to getting projects going efficiently?

DR: On a series of short-term extensions, you’re always making short-term business decisions. Because we don’t know where we’re going to stand over the next three to five years in terms of a portfolio of work, we’re not going to make the decisions to invest in new equipment, buy a new building, to expand our space, hire 30 or 40 more people in anticipation of work coming down the road. We don’t know what’s going to be there. Short-term decisions aren’t good for the economy.

For an agency, look at DOT’s decision to stop the environmental review process for the cantilever section of the BQE. It’s an important project, but in the scheme of all the priorities, it wasn’t at the top of the list. So they had to make the very difficult decision to stop the work and basically say, “Let’s wait until the project becomes more critical.” Which is not the way you make infrastructure decisions. All this short-term thinking plays into what ultimately becomes a series of bad planning decisions, because everything is left until it’s a crisis.

Stay tuned for part two of our interview with Denise Richardson tomorrow, where we discuss the Tappan Zee Bridge, how New York state funds roads, and the enduring mystery of the New York Works Fund.

In the Senate, many swing states and some solid GOP strongholds produced votes in favor of a two-year transportation bill. The House GOP leadership hasn't budged. Image: T4A

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, Congressional Democrats, some Congressional Republicans, unions, industry groups, politicians from New Jersey, Chicago and Louisiana — they all have one message for the House of Representatives: Pass the Senate transportation bill.

President Obama made it a key part of his weekly address this Sunday, pointing out that the economy would “take a hit” without a full reauthorization. The Transportation Trades Department, an industry group within the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said it is “an outrage” that the House is delaying taking up the Senate’s bipartisan two-year bill. The National League of Cities urged the House to act in time for the spring construction season.

It’s widely considered a longshot that the House will pass the Senate bill, but if the momentum is shifting at all, it seems to be moving in that direction. On Monday three House Republicans — Reps. Charlie Bass (NH), Judy Biggert (IL), and Robert Dold (IL) — joined Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) in a letter to Speaker Boehner [PDF], pleading with the House to pass the Senate bill.

Meanwhile, the House GOP leadership appears to be floundering. With movement conservatives taking cues from groups like the Heritage Foundation, which is firmly opposed the Senate bill, the Republican base hasn’t budged. But the stubborn refusal to go in a bipartisan direction is starting to call to mind fights — the debt ceiling fiasco, the payroll tax brinkmanship — that damaged the House GOP’s standing. Earlier this month Politico called the House’s inability to move a reauthorization proposal out of its own chamber “Exhibit A” in “Republican Dysfunction.”

Since then, the chamber hasn’t looked much more functional. Boehner pulled a 60-day extension off the table yesterday when he failed to get the necessary votes. House Democrats were trying to force a vote on the Senate bill, but observers predict the House will cobble together a majority along partisan lines before the buzzer at week’s end. After that, it’s anyone’s guess how the end game will play out.

Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell could use endless extensions to whittle away the value of the Senate transportation bill. Photo: Bloomberg

Just to remind everyone where things stand, the Senate has passed, in a 74-22 vote, a two-year transportation bill that the House GOP doesn’t like. Meanwhile, the House has offered up a 90-day extension of current funding that Senate Democrats don’t like. House Republicans are expected to use their extension to buy time for their five-year bill that almost nobody likes.

The House leadership will make its first attempt to pass the 90-day extension today. Technically, since the bill isn’t on the schedule yet, the vote would be “under suspension of the rules,” and require a two-thirds majority to pass, or 290 votes. The Republicans only control 244 seats, so for the bill to pass today, at least 46 Democrats would have to support it.

Why wouldn’t the Democrats support it? Because they don’t want to be seen as withdrawing their support for the Senate bill. But if the extension doesn’t pass today, House Republicans will try to paint the Democrats as supporting a government shutdown, and the House would still bring the bill up later in the week.

But that creates a new wrinkle, because, according to Politico, the Senate is working on a shorter extension, maybe as short as 45 days, to protect its larger bill. If the House’s extension doesn’t pass today, that means there would be very little time to reconcile two extensions of different lengths, after all the Senate’s procedural votes are done with.

Why the desire for a shorter extension? Because every extension eats away at the Senate bill’s value as a long-term reauthorization measure. The Senate’s two-year bill would go into effect retroactively to September 30, 2011, meaning that even if it were to be signed into law tomorrow, it will only be in effect for 18 months. Tack on a 90-day extension, and what is nominally a two-year bill would in reality be a 15-month bill. Another 90 day extension to the August recess would reduce the Senate bill to little more than a one-year deal, and any extensions beyond that would effectively kill the Senate bill altogether.

So, to recap: The fight between the House and Senate right now has likely boiled down to a fight between a 90-day extension and a 45-or-60-day extension. Five days remain on the clock and anything can change on a dime, minute to minute. Stay tuned.

House foot-dragging on passing a transportation bill is getting repetitive. Photo: The|G|uk/flickr

The 90-day extension would be the ninth passed since the last long-term transportation bill, SAFETEA-LU, expired in September 2009. The House passed the eighth extension of SAFETEA-LU in September 2011 by an unrecorded voice vote. No date has been set for debate or floor votes, but the extension does get a mention in Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s schedule for next week.

Mica’s proposal was introduced just one day after his Democratic counterpart on the Tranpsortation & Infrastructure Committee, Nick Rahall, introduced the Senate’s two-year bill in the House as H.R. 14. House Republicans have justified their opposition to the Senate bill by claiming they still prefer a five-year reauthorization, but the have not yet found a way to pay for it — the gas tax alone will not be able to cover five years of transportation funding at current levels.

In fact, Politico reported this morning that the Congressional Budget Office predicts the Highway Trust Fund’s balance will hit zero sometime in the summer of 2013 — which is even before the Senate bill expires. The Senate does not need to change their bill to accommodate the new estimate (they knew this would happen and built a cushion into the bill for just that purpose), but further extensions will only make it harder to stretch the trust fund to cover costs.

With both houses needing to raise new money for underfunded transportation programs, the question arises: What would Reagan do?

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is just waiting to pounce on Speaker Boehner for taking up Democratic legislation like the Senate transportation bill. Photo: Plain Dealer

Even though his efforts to whip his party into passing a five-year transportation bill that attacks transit, biking, and walking have been fruitless, House Speaker John Boehner isn’t about to follow through on his threat to take up the Senate’s two-year bill. That bill passed with 22 GOP ayes (and 22 nays) in the Senate earlier this week.

Politico reported this morning that the House Transportation Committee still plans to take up something resembling Boehner’s disastrous HR 7, but not before the eighth extension of SAFETEA-LU expires at the end of this month. The earliest the House plans to take up their bill is April 16, after the Easter recess – and it could be long after that.

While a Boehner spokesperson said no final decision had been reached, Joshua Schank of the Eno Center for Transportation said the speaker’s threat to take up the Senate bill was always an empty one. “The Republican caucus would have revolted against it and Boehner would have lost this job,” Schank said. “If [the Senate bill] passed [in the House], it would have passed because Democrats had voted for it. [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor is breathing down his neck. If that happens, he’ll just say, ‘Look, you passed a bill that was a Democratic bill; it wasn’t a Republican bill. So he should be out; what kind of Republican leader is that?’”

Politico says the House will introduce a measure to extend SAFETEA-LU yet again the week of March 26, to give them time to pass their own bill. But there are several ways this plan could fail.

First, the Senate could very well obstruct the extension. Everyone involved has been pledging for many months now that there would be no more extensions. The Senate has done its job. Rather than enable the House to take up more and more time pushing its unpopular five-year bill, the Senate could play hardball and force the House’s hand. At that point, the House would either have to take up the Senate bill or let the nation’s transportation program lapse – at the cost of an estimated 847,294 jobs.

The second problem with the plan to take up the House bill yet again is the simple fact that that bill has not garnered enough support to pass it. The budget hawks are as vocal and powerful as ever, and they just won’t take up a bill as big as the House’s five-year bill. And although keeping dedicated funding for transit probably attracts more votes than it loses, some conservatives are dead-set against voting for a bill that continues the policy begun by Ronald Reagan of paying for transit with gas tax revenue.

The third problem is that the longer Congress waits to take up a bill the more meaningless it becomes. “What, are they going to work and kill themselves in conference to pass a bill that’s really only going to last one year?” said Schank. “So it pushes us closer and closer to an extension that kicks this through past the election.”

Making this situation even more volatile is the fact that the expiration of the gas tax is now mixed in with the reauthorization. The timelines for the two measures used to be separate, but they coincided September 30 and were extended together, so now they both expire March 31.

Though the transportation bill gets far more airtime than the gas tax, the gas tax is the bedrock issue. After all, the bill can make all the funding commitments legislators want, but that funding has to come out of gas tax receipts. If those receipts don’t come in, there’s no funding. While gas tax extensions usually pass quietly and without fanfare, there’s always fear that the hyper-conservative House will suddenly rebel against anything called a “tax” and refuse to extend it.

The next two weeks sure will be interesting.

The T4A analysis breaks down each bill, policy by policy, and lays out any pending amendments to the House bill that could potentially change it for the better.

Here’s an excerpt from their detailed comparison:

Public transportation & transit-oriented development

Senate: Continues dedicated funding for public transportation at traditional 20 percent share. Creates some new flexibility to spend federal funds on operations, i.e., keeping buses and trains running, not just buying new equipment. A new transit-oriented development planning program was incorporated into the bill via the Banking title.

House: Original bill ends 30 years of dedicated funding for public transit (read the letter we organized by more than 600 groups and individuals opposing this). Allows loans for transit-oriented development as an eligible expense under the TIFIA loan program. It doesn’t provide large transit operators with any flexibility to spend federal money on operating their transit systems.

Possible House amendment fix:  LaTourette/Carnahan 16 would allow all transit agencies to use a portion of their federal transit funding for operating expenses during times of economic crisis. (This amendment is similar to this bill the two representatives offered back in 2011.)

Walking and bicycling, local control of funds

Senate: Due in part to this amendment offered by Senators Cardin and Cochran and incorporated into the bill, MAP-21 consolidates programs for making biking and walking safer (as well as for other small local projects) and gives 50 percent of this consolidated program directly to metro areas. States and metro areas must create a competitive grant process to distribute that funding to local communities that apply. The Commerce Committee title also includes a new Complete Streets provision.

House: Eliminates most dedicated funding for bicycling & walking. Those uses remain “eligible” but without any dedicated funding for them. The bill also deletes numerous references throughout the bill that encourage multimodal projects. The bill retains the Recreational Trails program.

Possible House amendment fix: Petri-Blumenauer 103 creates consolidated program for bike/ped and other local projects and provides local governments access to new consolidated pot of funding.

Read the rest here.

Check out the nuances of Boehner’s statement, quoted in The Hill last Thursday:

Will Boehner bring the House bill back from the dead? Photo: Cincinnati.com

“As I told the members yesterday, the current plan is to see what the Senate can produce and to bring their bill up,” Boehner told reporters at his weekly news conference Thursday.

“In the meantime, we’re going to continue to have conversations with our members about a longer term approach, which frankly most of our members want. But at this point in time, the plan is to bring up the Senate bill – or something like it.”

House members are away from the Capitol this week on recess, but this is when the GOP leadership is having those “conversations.” And when Boehner said he’ll be discussing a “longer term approach,” what he means is a bill that gives short shrift to transit, biking, and walking so the House can squeeze out more money for highways — and hence more years of spending for their bill.

The GOP bill has too much oil drilling to win votes from the Democratic side of the aisle. But if leadership can buy time to convince enough hesitant Republicans that they’re better off supporting Boehner’s bill than the bipartisan Senate bill, they could yet gather together enough votes to set up a showdown with the Senate.

So if you want to protect policies that invest in transit and safe streets, this is no time to rest on your laurels. Even with the House in recess, advocates are gearing up for a last push this week to make sure the bill is really, truly dead.

Harry Reid will face his next tough vote as early as Tuesday. Photo: Office of Harry Reid

Senate Bill Gets Bigger, Better, But Harder to Move

Senator Harry Reid took a lot of business into his own hands yesterday, unveiling his updated version of the Senate’s “two year” bill (it’s really only ever been 18 months), and incorporating the Cardin-Cochran amendment that grants metro areas greater control over bike-ped spending.

Why now? A couple of potential roadblocks fell and Reid probably saw an opportunity. First, the Senate voted down Roy Blunt’s contraception amendment. At the same time, Egypt let the American NGO employees there leave the country, clearing a second “non-germane” amendment to the transportation bill. That only leaves a Keystone XL pipeline amendment… and about a hundred more.

Reid’s inclusion of Cardin-Cochran is good news in that it eliminates the need for a separate vote on that particular amendment. However, Reid’s strategy also sets up a cloture vote on the entire package, which could come as early as next Tuesday. Cloture requires 60 votes to pass (the Democratic caucus controls only 53 seats), and so far, Reid is only 1-for-2 in cloture votes on the transportation bill. If this next vote fails, he will still have to find a way of dealing with the remaining amendments.

He will find it very difficult to bring Republicans over to his side, and it may be getting harder to keep the Democrats in line. Members of both parties are tiring of Reid’s tendency to “fill the tree,” using his authority as majority leader to prevent others from amending the bill (which he also did yesterday).

Two Democrats already broke ranks to vote for the Blunt amendment yesterday, so you can’t say Reid doesn’t know what he’s up against.

House Bill Shrinks to Nothing, Still Stinks

First it was a six-year transportation bill. Then it was a five-year drilling, transportation, and pension reform bill. Then, just for the first half of this week, it was an 18-month bill.

Now there’s no bill, and no indication of when there will be one. So far, Speaker John Boehner’s signature jobs initiative has been marked by setbacks, delays, in-party squabbling and activist outrage. All we know is that however big it is, it will represent leaps and bounds backwards, policy-wise.

We also know that Boehner is running out of time. Current transportation policy expires on March 31. That may sound like 29 days, but remember that the full House isn’t in session on Fridays, and they have the whole week of March 12 off (for spring break, maybe). That really only leaves them 12 days to pass a bill, and debating the transportation bill isn’t scheduled for any of them.

Steve LaTourette told Politico this morning that “three to six weeks would be sort of the reasonable thing to do” if no bill passes by the end of March. Fellow Republican Aaron Schock, who sits in Ray LaHood’s old chair in the House, told Politico that he doesn’t think “anyone anticipates transportation funding running out on March 31.”

It’s worth noting that while the transportation bill was imploding, House Republicans introduced the Jump-start Our Business Start-ups (JOBS) act. It’s small potatoes by comparison, combining six smaller bills that mostly deal with financial regulations. But it’s the first sign of bipartisanship out of a House that has so far catered almost exclusively to the extreme right.

If Congress passes a transpo bill that skimps on transit and safe streets, they'll force more Americans to shell out at the pump. Image: EDF

Gas prices, you may have heard, are on the rise again. And so is pandering about pain at the pump. Four years after $4 a gallon gas spawned “Drill, Baby, Drill” and insane political gimmickry on the presidential campaign trail (remember the “gas tax holiday” favored by John McCain and Hillary Clinton?), gas price populism is back with a vengeance.

To hear House Speaker John Boehner tell it, oil drilling and highways are all it takes to liberate American families from the tyranny of the pump. The Republican presidential candidates are also promising to reduce the price of gas through the magic of drilling. Even Ron Paul — the guy who supposedly gets how markets work — posits that he could bring about dime a gallon gas.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are flailing away at phantom price gougers and Wall Street speculators. Even President Obama, who never fell for the gas tax holiday while campaigning in 2008, is exaggerating the potential of alternative fuels to substitute for gas.

As Dave Roberts pointed out on Grist last week, with the exception of New Mexico’s Jeff Bingaman, just about everyone in the Senate seems scared to come out and face reality. Gas prices are set largely by the global oil market, and the only sure way to protect Americans from high prices at the pump is to make it easier to use less gas.

Even with the House and Senate neck deep in the process of updating national transportation policy, few in Congress are willing to point out the obvious: The next transportation bill is a golden opportunity to save Americans money by giving them more affordable ways to get around.

A 2006 study found that working families in 28 American metro areas spend, on average, 29 percent of household income on transportation — even more than they spend on housing [PDF]. And a two-person adult household that uses transit saves an average of $6,251 per year compared to a household with two cars and no transit access, according to the Complete Streets Coalition [PDF].

In other words, by investing in transit and safe streets Congress can help Americans unlock huge savings – much more than the typical family saw from the most recent round of tax cuts.

Instead, Boehner and the House GOP leadership put out a bill that doubled down on car dependence, yanking away dedicated funding for transit, biking and walking. While it looks like the House GOP is going to abandon their outright attack on transit, early indications are that their Plan B will shortchange investment in more affordable transportation too. Boehner still thinks “drill and drive” is a winning message.

So someone’s got to say it: John Boehner’s transportation policy is a recipe for impoverishing people. Americans can’t afford a transportation bill that forces families to burn fuel every time they want to go somewhere.

The House's retreat on de-funding transit is good news for projects like Cincinnati's proposed streetcar. Photo: Urban Cincy

Indications out of Speaker John Boehner’s office are that the GOP leadership will no longer try to eliminate dedicated transit funding, but odds are that some serious problems with the bill will persist:

• It eliminates bike-ped programs.

We’ll have to wait and see exactly what happens to popular programs like Transportation Enhancements, Safe Routes to School, and Recreational Trails once the new bill is released. The previous House bill would have cut the dedicated funding stream for these programs, forcing bike-ped investments to compete for general fund dollars along with transit. To fully restore bike-ped funding, the House will have to ensure that these programs have a dedicated revenue stream and aren’t supported by the same pot that funds transit.

• It increases dependence on oil.

Boehner’s spokesperson said yesterday that the new bill will “retain the speaker’s vision of linking infrastructure to expanded American energy production.” That’s not a surprise, since H.R. 3408, the bill that opens up swaths of the country’s land and sea for drilling and includes the Keystone XL pipeline provision, has already passed the House. Tying infrastructure to drilling means deepening, not reversing, dependence on fossil fuels and environmentally damaging extraction techniques like fracking.

• It weakens environmental protections.

Jesse Prentice-Dunn of the Sierra Club wrote recently on what H.R. 7′s “streamlining” and “expediting” measures would do to environmental protections — namely, provide as many bypasses around them as possible. For example:

In an extreme departure from current law, the bill would require that all environmental reviews be completed within 270 days and automatically approve any project that does not achieve that arbitrary deadline – regardless of the project’s impacts on communities, the environment, or the economy. Instead of trying to find the best project for a community, this provision would rubber stamp any project as long as the sponsors ran out the clock.

This kind of streamlining has even found some support in the Senate, which provides further cause for alarm, since text that is the same in two companion bills cannot be altered by a conference committee.

Still, if the House leadership really does back off of their plans for transit funding, there’s hope for more improvements if advocates keep pushing.

Michael Steel, a spokesperson for Speaker John Boehner, told the National Journal today:

Given Senate Democrats’ unwillingness to pursue a longer-term infrastructure and energy plan, House Republican leaders are considering a revamped approach that would retain the speaker’s vision of linking infrastructure to expanded American energy production, and allow Republicans to stay on offense on energy and jobs.

According to one Hill staffer, if the GOP are blaming Democrats for refusing to cooperate, it likely means they didn’t have the support they needed within their own party to win a simple majority. The source said the bill was facing negative reactions from the transportation industry and advocates, as well as more spending-averse representatives from the far right wing.

Whatever the House GOP offers in its place will not kick transit funding out of the highway trust fund, the source said. That would fix a huge flaw in the bill, but as T4America points out, there are many more shortcomings that need to be addressed.

Boehner already had to delay floor debate on his transportation bill before the President’s Day recess began. Streetsblog will have more on this story as it develops.

When two companion pieces of legislation pass their respective chambers, they are combined by a conference committee. The committee is made up of members of both the House and the Senate, and it is their job to resolve differences between the two bills. (Most recently, a conference committee forged a compromise on extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment insurance.)

Committee members are limited in that for each provision, they must choose either one chamber’s version or the other’s — they generally do not have the power to come up with something new on the spot. Furthermore, if the two bills agree on something, that provision can’t be altered by the conference committee.

There are already good chunks of the House and Senate bill that are the same — eliminating dedicated bike-ped funding, for instance. The House bill admittedly goes much further than the Senate’s, but if the two bills were to be conferenced right now, Safe Routes to School, Transportation Enhancements and Recreational Trails would all be history. The committee would then have to choose how to weaken those programs: eliminate them altogether, like the House bill, or keep them eligible under Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program but let states opt out of them. Another critical choice: fund CMAQ from the Highway Trust Fund, as in the Senate bill, or fund it from the the smoke-and-mirrors “alternative transportation account” envisioned in the House bill.

We’ve been reading about this moment a lot, as the current GOP leadership in the House tries to undo Reagan’s legacy by eviscerating dedicated transit funding.

In this ABC News clip, you can see that Reagan touted the measure, a five cent gas tax increase, as an economic catalyst. It would raise $5.5 billion for transportation investment and result in 320,000 new jobs, the administration said. The measure even reserved one cent per gallon for transit, all for the cost of about $30 a year for the average driver.

Sounds like a win-win, right? After some initial resistance to the idea, Reagan eventually came around to that perspective, even if some special interest groups (truckers) didn’t.

What a difference 29 years makes.

Oregon's Earl Blumenauer has a knack for getting straight to the point. This was the image he used to illustrate his impassioned defense of the Safe Routes to School program yesterday morning.

A lot of folks are upset about this proposal, which would eliminate dedicated federal funding for transit, biking, and walking, open up some of the country’s environmental treasures to oil drilling and delay infrastructure insolvency for all of two years.

Leave it to Oregon’s Earl Blumenauer to really let ‘em have it. The Hill reports that Blumenauer delivered an impassioned speech accompanied by this sign that really hits home.

Some highlights below:

This is a wildly popular program, costing a fraction of a percent of the transportation budget, and it’s had a huge impact nationally on our children because it deals with real consequences for them.

Doesn’t it make sense to do something about the congestion, the injury, the death and the obesity?

So why are my Republican friends advancing a transportation bill attacking Safe Routes to School, stripping it out, making it an unsafe route to school? Well, it’s a fitting metaphor for perhaps the worst transportation bill in history.

Well said, sir.

Boehner’s office attributed the decision to two factors: One of the offsets in the payroll tax cut agreement is a reduction in pension benefits for federal workers that overlaps with a cost offset in the highway bill, plus a thick docket of amendments makes it more difficult to finish the bill by the end of this week.

Left unsaid in Boehner’s rationale is the difficulty that Republican leaders have had in assembling the necessary vote for a bill that funds surface transportation programs, opens up oil drilling and cuts back on the federal contribution to government workers’ pensions.

The news is a sign that Boehner’s attack on transit and street safety programs is treading on thin ice, but defeating the House GOP’s highways and drilling initiative is far from guaranteed.

Delaying the vote on the transportation portion frees up the House to first take up the energy-only portion, which expands offshore and arctic oil and gas drilling and contains the Keystone XL pipeline provision. That bill will be debated and possibly voted on by the entire House today.

For Boehner, the key is still the transportation portion, known as H.R. 7. Last night the House Rules Committee established that if H.R. 7 does not pass, then the energy and pension reform bills cannot be recombined and would head to the Senate individually. It is unlikely that an isolated drilling bill would find much support in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

H.R. 7 does not reflect the historically bipartisan nature of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The Administration has serious concerns with provisions in the bill that would make America’s roads, rails, and transit systems less safe, reduce the transportation options available to America’s traveling public, short circuit local decision-making, and turn back the clock on environmental and labor protections…

Because this bill jeopardizes safety, weakens environmental and labor protections, and fails to make the investments needed to strengthen the Nation’s roads, bridges, rail, and transit systems, the President’s senior advisors would recommend that he veto this legislation.

The announcement makes Obama the highest-profile critic of the House transportation bill, a group that already included Secretary LaHood, hundreds of advocacy groups, heavy-hitting lobbyists representing big business, and a growing number of Republican congressmen.

President Obama had already endorsed the Senate’s two-year transportation bill proposal, which so far has received bipartisan support. But that was before the President’s budget called for $476 billion in transportation investment over six years, a proposal that goes above and beyond anything that the House and Senate have been working on. LaHood is defending the administration’s transportation budget today before the Senate Budget Committee.

It will be interesting to see how Obama’s statement affects what happens in Congress. Yesterday, House Republicans split their transportation bill into three smaller bills, which will be debated and voted on separately, presumably to maximize the chances of each part passing. The component of the bill that robs transit of dedicated funding still may not have the votes to pass. With the current extension of the last transportation bill set to expire on March 31, the House will still have to take some sort of action if H.R. 7 goes nowhere.

One thing isn’t in doubt: By putting out a proposal that departs so radically from 30 years of transportation policy, begun under Ronald Reagan no less, Boehner was practically begging to start a high-profile political fight over this bill. As election season heats up and the administration responds to the House GOP’s attack on transit and street safety programs, it looks like national transportation policy will continue to be in the spotlight.