Streetsblog New York City

Four New York City members of Congress joined the chairman of the MTA today to bluntly denounce the House GOP’s anti-transit transportation bill.

“It’s the worst piece of legislation you could ever imagine,” said MTA chief Joe Lhota, a Republican who served as the city’s budget director during the Giuliani administration.

“The worst transportation bill we have ever seen,” agreed Representative Jerry Nadler, a liberal Democrat.

Though the Republican proposal includes a number of other reasons for New Yorkers to hate it, such as eliminating the Safe Routes to School and Transportation Enhancements programs, which fund bicycle and pedestrian improvements, today’s presser focused on the attack on dedicated transit funding.

Currently, about 20 percent of federal gas tax revenues are devoted to transit, which provides the MTA $1 billion per year in dedicated capital funding. The transit agency gets another $400 million a year from the federal general fund. Under the Republican proposal, all transit funds would come from the general fund, where they’d have to compete with defense, health care and other spending priorities.

That $1 billion a year is absolutely necessary for the MTA to continue repairing the system and building expansions, and it could disappear entirely. Charlie Rangel, former chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, which passed the anti-transit provision, said he asked influential House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan where the money to pay for transit would come from in the general fund. “The answer was they did not know at that time,” said Rangel.

The four Congress members in attendance did not mince words about the House bill. “Not even worth a warm bucket of asphalt,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney. Nadler said the bill exposed the attitude of the Republican Party toward transit riders: “You’re second class citizens. We don’t give a damn about you. Just disappear.”

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Halfway through the extra month that Congress gave itself to resolve a long-simmering dispute over funding the nation's transportation system, Democratic leaders remain deadlocked over whether -- and how long -- to wait before debating a broad reform of federal infrastructure policy.

In one corner: House transportation committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN), who has enlisted most of his colleagues in the lower chamber in a push to pass new legislation replacing the outmoded 2005 infrastructure bill -- "a paean to the individual motorist," as Wired put it today.

But Oberstar's enthusiasm has not yet been met with action by the panel he needs most, the Ways and Means Committee.

Why is Ways and Means so important? The panel controls the funding source for transportation legislation, and chairman Charles Rangel has yet to see enthusiasm for his colleagues for making tough choices about raising revenue for infrastructure. Rangel told CQ this week:

Everyone is excited about a robust transportation bill. The enthusiasm is out there. We have not concluded that everyone is willing to pay for it and call it an emergency. 

Oberstar has done his part to rally the troops, publishing an op-ed in The Hill today that laments the "lack of political will" to tend to the nation's aging infrastructure, but little progress can be made until Ways and Means shows an appetite for diving into the funding question.

How much needs to be raised to pay for a new bill? There is an estimated $140 billion gap between expected grosses for the nation's highway trust fund, which pays for federal spending on transit as well as roads, and the investments envisioned in Oberstar's $450 billion measure.

That gap could be closed by a 10-cent per-gallon increase in the gas tax or by other means, though the former has pitfalls both political (Democrats have not worked on a counter-message to GOP pummeling on the issue) and practical (as Americans drive less in more efficient cars, the tax's value is waning).

In response to the dilemma, both parties have gotten creative. Rep. John Larson (CT), a Ways and Means member who also chairs the House Democratic caucus, has proposed taking unused money from the government's financial bailout for transportation. Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) spoke for a sizable group in his party today by suggesting that unused cash from the stimulus law go to infrastructure.

But both of those concepts would be little more than Band-Aids, given that congressional budget writers must rely on a steady source of funding when setting the "baseline" that governs the price tag of future federal transport bills. If the bailout or the stimulus were tapped this year, when the next long-term bill rolls around, the baseline would likely be low enough to cause serious havoc.

On the whole, the gas tax remains the only funding source that has attracted serious consideration, most recently from the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate. The Obama administration, however, remains flatly opposed to an increase during the current recession. Speaking of the administration ...

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In a report released this morning, Transportation for America (T4A) expands on its months-long effort to map transit cutbacks across the nation and concludes that 10 of the largest 25 local agencies are being forced to hike fares by more than 13 percent.

T4A's report illustrates the punishing effect of such cuts on transit riders, many of them low-income workers, with a set of well-trammeled statistics: demand hit a 50-year high in 2008; every dollar invested in transit produces an estimated $6 in economic growth; transit is far safer than car travel and provides greater public health benefits.

But when it comes to the political battle over remaking national transport priorities, T4A's transit cuts map -- viewable right here -- speaks loudest of all.

Transit fare increases and service reductions, T4A found, are concentrated in major cities and along the coasts. And as the current health care conflagration has shown, lawmakers rarely wield political power that's commensurate with the share of the population they represent.

As the Washington Post's Alec MacGillis catalogued in a commentary last week, Senate influence is particularly concentrated in the hands of small-state denizens such as Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D) of Montana, who fought to remove a provision helping transit agencies with punitive tax shelters from last year's auto bailout bill.

Per MacGillis:

And then there's the Senate's age-old distortion of distributive politics, in which goodies are doled out on anything but a per-capita basis. California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey are among the 10 states that get the least back per tax dollar sent to Washington; Alaska, the Dakotas and West Virginia are among those that get the most.

In that context, it's not surprising that federal support for metro-area priorities such as transit is so perilously thin. Even in the House, where urban representatives lead several key committees, transit backers have yet to convince the Ways and Means panel to move forward with a solution to the immense revenue gap that has stalled progress on new long-term transport legislation.

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Leaders of the House transportation committee, doggedly pursuing a six-year, $450 billion infrastructure bill this year, pressed their case this morning before Ways and Means Committee colleagues who must approve a new funding mechanism for their massive legislation.

"We should have indexed a long time ago the highway user fee" -- also known as the gas tax -- transportation panel chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) told the Ways and Means revenue panel. "But that got lost in the process."

Oberstar asked Ways and Means members to okay a $3 billion patch for the highway trust fund, which is expected to run dry next month.

That course would postpone until September the House's transportation-funding battle with the White House and the Senate, where 18 months of stopgap funding is almost certain to be approved within two weeks.

Ways and Means has dedicated most of its time and energy to health care reform this summer, leading to widespread speculation that transportation would fall by the wayside. But Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA), chairman of Ways and Means' revenue panel, told Oberstar that he was on the transportation committee's side.

"I share your position that we should go forward" with a bill this year, Neal told Oberstar.

Yet the chairman of the full Ways and Means committee, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), has yet to throw his weight behind Oberstar's goals. Without Rangel's muscle, the thorny question of how to pay for a new transportation bill would be almost impossible to resolve by the end of September.

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