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The news agency BNA is reporting that the president appears likely to release his proposed draft of a transportation bill soon. The administration is circulating a partial draft of its proposed bill [PDF], signaling that a release could be imminent.

The administration rarely writes its own legislative language to submit to Congress, and indeed, the language that comes out of the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over transportation will be more significant, as those are the bodies that eventually vote on the bill. Still, this is the first look we’ve seen at official legislative text.

The 224-page draft, along with a 61-page analysis that’s circulating along with it, does not appear to hold many surprises for those who paid attention to the administration’s February announcement of Obama’s transportation priorities. BNA’s Adam Snider warns that USDOT “would not confirm the validity of the document, which a lobbyist warned might be an early draft that has subsequently changed.”

Snider reports that one significant addition is more information on a program to allow states to do their own environmental impact statements, to avoid letting projects get bottlenecked in the federal pipeline. This issue came up many times in House and Senate stakeholder meetings. Especially in the context of a small bill, people are looking for efficiencies and savings everywhere they can, and the environmental review process has been identified as a prime place to speed up project delivery.

Whether Obama’s bill is submitted to Congress over today or next week, we can expect to see it soon, as both houses are getting down to business on their own versions of the transportation reauthorization, which they both want to pass out of committee by Memorial Day.

It’s Monday morning, and the government is open for business. In a last-minute agreement just an hour before the current budget extension was to expire Friday night, Democrats and Republicans avoided the nuclear option of a government shutdown.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid didn't have to shut down the government after all. Photo: AP

They cut $38.5 billion from the 2010 budget; $78.5 billion from President Obama’s 2011 budget proposal. Some of the more controversial riders included by the GOP were stripped, including one to block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. To give themselves time to work out the details, vote in both chambers, and get the budget measure signed by the president, they passed a one-week extension to the current budget.

As Angie wrote in today’s network roundup, the one-week extension contained $2 billion in cuts that disproportionately hurt transit and urban development. But it does get a little better from there: The full budget for the remaining six months of the fiscal year goes easier on transit, rail and livability programs than some had feared.

Transportation didn’t escape unscathed, but it could have been worse. TIGER funding was left intact, with all $600 million for 2011 included in the budget — a piece of unexpected good news for reformers. And Transportation for America’s Sean Barry notes that the cuts to transportation and housing were largely “non-controversial” because many of them came from budget items the president was also planning to reduce or eliminate for next year. In a blog post, the White House said, “Our team also went after wasteful spending and earmarked, special interest programs including $630 million in earmarked transportation projects and at least $2.5 billion in transportation funding that is ready to be earmarked.”

Transportation advocates are beginning to take note of a trend toward talking about “wasteful” transportation spending. While it’s mostly Republicans using this rhetoric, the White House statement indicates that the Obama administration is trying to define wasteful transportation spending in its own way. With the GOP leadership staking out a sharply different position from the administration on transportation investment, the contours are starting to emerge in a debate over what it means to make smart investments in transportation. Does efficient spending involve using performance metrics and competitive grants to select projects, or does it just involve cutting transit and active transportation out of the bill?

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The president’s six-year transportation plan [PDF], included as part of the administration’s FY2012 budget proposal, weighs in at a hefty $556 billion and lays out several policy reforms that, if enacted, could help the nation transition to a more multi-modal, less oil-dependent transportation system.

The plan is a blueprint that Congress can use as a basis for its transportation reauthorization bill. It has a lot in common with then-Transportation Committee Chair Jim Oberstar’s bill from 2009. And, like Oberstar’s bill, it leaves unanswered the question of how to fund transportation investments. This time, however, it comes in the midst of an all-out Republican war on deficit spending.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says the president's proposal represents the administration's "big bold vision" for transportation. Photo: Tanya Snyder

How much of this plan will survive the GOP cutting machine is anyone’s guess. There’s a lot in the president’s proposal that’s worth saving. Some notable elements:

• Transit funding is going up by 127 percent, while funding for roads and bridges is getting a 48 percent increase. That represents a significant shift in the highways-to-transit ratio, which will go from an 80-20 split to a 74-26 split.
• The Highway Trust Fund is getting a long-overdue name change. The new Transportation Trust Fund will now have four accounts – the traditional highways and mass transit accounts and also new accounts for passenger rail and an infrastructure bank.
• Some advocates are disappointed that the proposed infrastructure bank will be housed at DOT and not be formed as an independent entity, as many had hoped. Still, the shift to more discretionary, competitive grants is a huge victory for reformers.
• The consolidation of 55 road programs into five means there will no longer be separate pots of money for bridges, for example, or trucker rest areas, according to Undersecretary Roy Kienitz. That money will be rolled into a larger pot of funding for highways that states and local governments will compete for. The five programs will be: the National Highway Program, Highway Safety Improvement, Livable Communities, Federal Allocation and Research, Technology, and Education.
• The TIFIA loan program will go from a $120 million allocation to $450 million; TIGER, which has given out $2.1 billion in grants so far, will get $2 billion the first year in the president’s proposal.
• The funding for livability programs – $28 billion over six years – will include bike and pedestrian improvements, but allocation decisions rest with the states.
• While the new bill doesn’t have a line item for a new national freight policy or a new office overseeing freight movement, Kienitz said freight programs got the lion’s share of TIGER grants (pun not intended, I think) and will be well-positioned to get money from the infrastructure bank.
• Amtrak funding will be split into two accounts: one for state of good repair and one for new system development.

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The White House hasn’t released its FY2012 budget request yet. What we know so far is that it’s a $3.7 trillion budget that would reduce the deficit from $1.6 trillion projected for 2011 to $1.2 trillion next year. President Obama “trims or terminates” more than 200 federal programs, according to the Washington Post, but has big plans for transportation: his budget envisions a $556 billion transportation bill.

Image: Reuters

As expected, the President is trying to simplify the federal transportation program, consolidating 60 programs into five. The Post reports that those would be “limited to making investments only if Congress agrees on a financing plan that would not increase the deficit.” Politico reports that transportation would come from a “single trust fund covering highways and passenger rail systems like Amtrak.”

Insiders say there’s no gas tax hike planned (no surprise there) but there is funding to start a National Infrastructure Bank.

President Obama is also calling for increases in education spending, education research, and broadband access.

He plans to raise revenues by increasing some taxes on the wealthy, teeing up for another battle with Republicans, and ending oil and gas subsidies.

Among the cuts: community development block grants would lose $300 million, $1 billion would be cut from large airport grants, and nearly $1 billion would be trimmed from a fund that finances water treatment plans and other infrastructure projects, according to the Post.

We’ll be hearing more from the Department of Transportation in a few hours and will bring you more news when we have it.

On Valentine’s Day, President Obama’s heart-shaped box of chocolates to Congress will come in the form of his budget request for 2012. It will include the president’s proposal for a six-year transportation reauthorization.

The FY2012 budget request comes as Congress is still wrangling over the budget for the rest of FY2011 (which, by the way, started October 1, 2010).

After conversations with experts about what we can expect from the president’s transportation vision, this is what we’ve come up with:

1. We don’t really know.

The administration has been especially tight-lipped about this one. Advocates (and yours truly) have begged DOT officials for the slightest shred of information, and they’re doing an admirable job defending the secrecy of the document until showtime.

2. They’re going to make the case for a big bill and funding reforms

If the $53 billion high-speed rail announcement was any indication – and it was probably intended to be one – the administration is still thinking big on infrastructure, and they’re willing to stomach the big price tag. Obama’s economic team has been pushing for it for months.

The Council of Economic Advisers came out with a report in the fall, analyzing the economic impact of infrastructure investment – and specifically calling for a range of transportation options, a fix-it-first approach, walkability, and performance metrics.

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President Obama made his long-awaited infrastructure push during his State of the Union address – with more information included in an accompanying memo released today (see below). This is what he told Congress:

The third step in winning the future is rebuilding America. To attract new businesses to our shores, we need the fastest, most reliable ways to move people, goods, and information – from high-speed rail to high-speed internet. [Applause]

Our infrastructure used to be the best – but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation’s infrastructure, they gave us a “D.”

We have to do better. America is the nation that built the transcontinental railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, and constructed the interstate highway system. The jobs created by these projects didn’t just come from laying down tracks or pavement. They came from businesses that opened near a town’s new train station or the new off-ramp.

Over the last two years, we have begun rebuilding for the 21st century, a project that has meant thousands of good jobs for the hard-hit construction industry. Tonight, I’m proposing that we redouble these efforts. [Applause]

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President Obama is expected to make a strong push for infrastructure spending during the State of the Union address tonight. Ahead of the address, the Transportation Equity Network organized its members and supporters to write to President Obama, telling their personal stories of why transit funding is crucial to their communities. In all, TEN will deliver 1,000 personal letters to the President asking him to support transit investments. A few have already been sent.

Here’s a sampling:

Lisa T. in St. Louis wrote:

As a high school teacher, I see how our less-than-adequate public transportation system impacts low-income families who do not have dependable personal transportation. Students and families who do not have cars are not able to participate in parent conferences, open house events, and extracurricular activities.

Jan H. of Montana wrote the president about how her hometown has been changed by car culture:

When I was a girl, there were two trains a day: east to Chicago and west to Spokane. Now, there are nothing but freeways clogged with big trucks.

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Streetsblog Capitol Hill is pleased to publish this guest post from Deron Lovaas, Federal Transportation Policy Director for NRDC.

The President got pulses racing in the transportation world with stirring speeches about infrastructure investment this past Labor Day and Columbus Day. And his economic advisers recently put out a thoughtful report [PDF] making the case for investing now, while building costs are low and so much labor is available in construction. Now is the time for the President to make a strong pitch to Congress and more importantly to the American public in his State of the Union. This is what I would say if I were writing the speech President Obama will give on Tuesday.

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We face a challenge in this country: Our transportation infrastructure policy is broken and it is going broke.

More than fifty years ago, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower worked with legislative leaders including Democratic Senator Al Gore, Sr. on a visionary transportation law: The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. This launched the construction of a world-class highway system that drove prosperity in the 20th century and now criss-crosses the nation. Thirty-five years later, Republican President George H. W. Bush worked with Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Representative Glenn Anderson to pass the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, reforming and updating Eisenhower’s vision to address America’s changing transportation needs.

Now is the time to honor that bipartisan legacy by building infrastructure that gives us a competitive edge in the 21st century.

But we’re not there yet – far from it.

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Last night, President Obama appeared on 60 Minutes to talk about the election results – a “shellacking,” as he’s called it – and chart the path forward. He talked a lot about infrastructure – and between the lines of some of his other comments are messages we should be paying attention to.

Steve Kroft interviews President Obama on 60 Minutes. Photo: AP

The first thing that piqued my attention was this:

In some cases, there may be worthy projects that we can’t do right now, just because we haven’t built the consensus for it. You know, that’s an aspect of leadership that I didn’t pay enough attention to in the first couple of years.

Obama seems to indicate he’s going to shy away from big legislative battles for a little while. It makes you wonder what “worthy projects” he’s going to sacrifice. It also begs the question: what does that mean for his $50 billion infrastructure push?

Well, he didn’t say anything specifically about that. Most advocates think the chances of lame-duck passage of any infrastructure spending (beyond the continuing resolution keeping spending at 2010 levels for the first couple months of next year) are, roughly, nil.

But President Obama still holds out hope for consensus on infrastructure spending.

60 MINUTES: Look, the Republicans aren’t interested in spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure right now. They don’t want stimulus programs.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, you know, again, historically, rebuilding our infrastructure is something that has garnered Democratic and Republican support. I want to have a conversation with them and see if that’s still the case. What I just mentioned in terms of providing tax breaks for companies that are investing here in the United States. That’s not a traditional liberal position. That’s a traditional Republican position. That’s a Chamber of Commerce position.

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The official White House photo of the president's meeting on infrastructure. That's Angela Glover Blackwell in the gold-checkered jacket.

On Monday, President Obama talked infrastructure with two governors, eight mayors, four former transportation secretaries (and the current one), two labor leaders – and one public interest advocate. That advocate was Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of the think tank PolicyLink and chair of the Transportation for America Equity Caucus, which launched last week. The roundtable discussed the president’s $50 billion infrastructure proposal, which is galvanizing transportation reformers as the contours come into sharper focus.

Blackwell spoke to Streetsblog about her meeting with the president, why transportation matters for social equity, and how people can help make the most of the current opportunity to reform national transportation policy.

Streetsblog: What was it like meeting with the president?

Blackwell: It was wonderful to be in a meeting with the president and the Treasury secretary and governors and mayors from around the country talking about infrastructure, with an emphasis on transportation. We’ve been focused on it for years, and it was encouraging to see it getting that level of attention and to see the President of the United States take an interest in transportation.

Angela Glover Blackwell

But I felt I had a tremendous responsibility to lift up the voices of low-income people and people of color and the communities where they live. It’s easy to talk about transportation and not talk about poverty, or the severe unemployment among Latinos and African Americans, those hit first and worst by this recession. I felt on my shoulders the responsibility to express that this has to be done in a way that impacts those who need it most. And the others there really heard what I was saying. Several referred back to what I had said, which was that transportation is a lifeline to opportunity in this country, and it’s way too important to leave to transportation professionals.

I also thought it was very important that at the top of the conversation, when the president came in, he turned to Governor Rendell and me to frame the conversation. He showed a lot of interest in talking about equity and inclusion.

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