All posts from the month of November 2011
Today’s Headlines – 11/28/11
November 28, 2011By Transportation for America
Although portions of the Senate transportation bill have been released, the transit title remains in the works. (Streetsblog Capitol Hill)
A diverse coalition of interests in Montana, the home state of Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, pressed for passage. (Great Falls Tribune)
Despite being zero-funded in the most-recent budget bill, high-speed moves forward due to funds rejected by several governors. (The Hill)
The “fringe suburb,” a contributor to the housing bubble that crashed the economy, is effectively dead, argued Christopher Leinberger. (NY Times)
And, the last round of grant recipients before the Partnership for Sustainable Communities loses funding was bittersweet. (Streetsblog Capitol Hill)
Supercommittee failure to reach agreement could lead to deeper transportation cuts
November 22, 2011By Sean Barry
The so-called deficit supercommittee, a bipartisan group of 12 lawmakers tasked with agreeing to $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, was supposed to unveil its recommendations this week for an up-or-down vote in Congress.
But the group, established in a down-to-the-wire debt ceiling deal between President Obama and Congressional Republicans this past summer, looks like it will have nothing to offer. The divide between the two parties, particularly over high-end tax rates, appears irreconcilable.
But the consequences for failure go beyond just another black eye for an unpopular Congress. When the supercommittee was created, it came with a “trigger” of automatic cuts if members failed to come to an agreement. A portion of that $1.2 trillion trigger will target defense and Medicare reimbursements, but a significant chunk encompasses yet-to-be identified discretionary spending.
That means the budget for the U.S. Department of Transportation, which just emerged from a tough battle over 2012 funding levels, is back on the chopping block.
Last week, the House and Senate passed and President Obama signed a “minibus” budget for 2012 that largely kept funding for transit, Amtrak and TIGER grants intact, while zeroing out high-speed rail. Many of these same programs would likely be subject to further cuts under a trigger scenario, though the new cuts would not materialize until the 2013 calendar year.
The six Republicans and six Democrats on the supercommittee — three of each party from the House and Senate, respectively — technically have until Wednesday to make recommendations, but in order for Congress to have a chance to vote and meet disclosure terms, they needed to send their proposal to the Congressional Budget Office Monday evening for scoring.
That deadline has come and gone.
Under a failure scenario, it would fall to members of the House and Senate appropriations committees to draft specific cuts, likely a contentious outcome given split party control. There is also the possibility that discretionary spending like USDOT programs could take an even larger hit if members follow through with plans to reverse the trigger-outlined cuts to defense, a politically-sensitive area for Republicans and Democrats alike. (President Obama has signaled his intent to veto any attempts to undo the automatically-triggered cuts that were part of the committee’s creation unless equivalent savings are identified).
Members could also vote to eliminate the trigger all-together, but that seems less likely given that House Republicans have emphasized spending cuts since taking the majority this year.
Today’s Headlines – 11/22/11
November 22, 2011By Transportation for America
Secretary Ray LaHood urged Congress to minimize further cuts to transportation following the failure of the deficit supercommittee. (Journal of Commerce)
Taxpayers for Common Sense said the House Republican plan to pay for infrastructure through drilling “is not a responsible budget approach.” (Streetsblog Capitol Hill)
Orlando’s Lymmo bus service has the potential for further expansion, including to the state’s popular SunRail system. (Orlando Sentinel)
Connecticut received federal support for an inter-city bus rapid transit system. (Transpo Nation)
And, the most recent transportation budget contains key changes to the DC area’s Airport Authority. (WaPo)
Visionary group in Montana tells us their rural transit success story
November 21, 2011By David Goldberg
This group we visited with last week in Montana, Opportunity Link, received a welcome shot in the arm, announced just this morning: they received a $1.5 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of the 2011 Sustainable Communities regional planning grant program. 468 applications requesting more than $500 million in funding were received by HUD, and only 56 communities and regions were selected for the grants.
If you ever doubt the need for public transit in rural areas, or need reaffirmation of the resilience and ingenuity of frontier America, make a trip to Havre, Montana (or second best, watch the short video below.) We had a chance to make that trip this week and, man, was it inspiring.
A group of us from T4America and the American Public Health Association traveled to Montana to meet with people working in health, transportation and local government in the state’s small cities and rural areas. They are vitally interested in the federal transportation bill because in many cases it literally could determine whether these places live, thrive or die.
One of those places is Havre, Montana, a town of about 10,000 roughly 30 miles from the Canadian border, nestled between two Native American reservations, Fort Belknap and Rocky Boy’s. There we met Barbara Stiffarm, the executive director of a scrappy organization called Opportunity Link. The aptly named group’s mission is to connect people in the isolated communities of north central Montana to jobs, job training, affordable housing, medical care and other services that help residents of small towns and reservations “achieve independence, prosperity and a better way of life.”
“We quickly discovered that we can’t do any of that without transportation service,” Stiffarm told us. Working with numerous local communities and the reservations, Opportunity Link has cobbled together federal resources, private grants and scant local funds to connect several different transportation services into an integrated network. To fill gaps in service, Opportunity Link two years ago led the creation of North Central Montana Transit.
NCMT is miraculous for a number of reasons.
First, it offers fixed-route service. Many rural transit services are “on demand” – covering the vast distances separating communities from employment, education and health care centers.
“Every day we cover an area about the size of the state Maryland,” said Jim Lyons, the director of NCMT. They started the service with modest expectations for ridership, but have been blown away by the unmet demand they discovered. Rather than riders in the low hundreds per month, they are instead into the thousands; one in ten is an elderly person who simply could not get to health care, activities and other services without it.
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| IMG_4340 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr. |
| The Dean of Montana State University-Northern shows off some of the seeds used to make the biodiesel for the NCMT buses during last week’s tour in Montana. They hope to use these seeds to help refuel trains passing through Havre from Seattle to Minneapolis. |
Second, they also discovered they were being eaten alive by fuel costs, and they were disturbed by the effect that burning all that fuel had on their desire to be a “green” operation.
That led to an exciting research and development project with Montana State University-Northern to grow their own biodiesel fuel. The idea is to get local wheat growers to rotate in crops of an oil-seed plant known as camelina. A recent break-through in the local research effort has raised hopes that camelina, which has the advantage of being an extremely hardy, non-food crop, can produce biodiesel that can fuel buses as well as the freight trains that use Havre as a refueling stop between Seattle and Minneapolis. More exciting still, a by-product of that process could also be a component in jet fuel.
And all because an ingenious local group set out to connect people to opportunities through rural transit!
As inspiring as it was, an eye-opening aspect of our trip was to see just how vulnerable these communities are, and how large a role the federal transportation bill plays in their operation.
The local leaders and service providers we met in Montana are mindful that changes to programs being considered in Congress could strengthen such services, and lead to greater coordination and efficiencies, or throttle them altogether. As one tangible example, the HUD Sustainable Communities program that awarded Opportunity Link the $1.5 million grant today was axed last week in the budget for 2012. They also are deeply concerned that changes to programs such as transportation enhancements, now being considered in the Senate’s MAP-21 version of the bill, could leave them no way to fund the community projects that have been vital to economic development and safety.
Further changes would reduce the input that these communities have into how the state sets transportation priorities and allocates funding. The level of alarm was high, and it served to strengthen our commitment as a coalition to continue to emphasize the needs of rural and frontier America and push for measures that will help them, as the bill makes its way through the House and Senate.
Today’s Headlines – 11/21/11
November 21, 2011By Transportation for America
CNN surveyed five myths about the gas tax.
Leading transportation industries, such as automakers and truckers, lean Republican in 2012. (TBD)
The San Francisco Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission is using more performance measures for project selection. (San Jose Mercury News)
Language in the recent “minibus” spending bill will make it easier for Detroit’s Woodward light-rail project to receive funding. (Detroit Free Press)
And, key House Democrat Nick Rahall is co-sponsoring a bill to create transportation jobs for out-of-work veterans. (Beckley Register-Herald)
Today’s Headlines – 11/18/11
November 18, 2011By Transportation for America
The House and Senate passed a “minibus” budget bill to fund transportation and other priorities. (WaPo)
Speaker John Boehner and transportation committee chairman John Mica promised to move quickly on legislation to pay for infrastructure with drilling. (Journal of Commerce)
House Democrats blasted the proposal as partisan and “short on details.” (The Hill)
And, several groups also weighed in, along with key Senators Boxer and Inhofe. (Sierra Club, NRDC, Competitive Enterprise Institute, EPW Majority and Minority)
House transportation plan tied to controversial revenue sources
November 17, 2011By Stephen Lee Davis
An emerging House proposal for a multi-year transportation bill, highlighted at a press conference today by Speaker John Boehner, is already raising strong concerns due to the stated intent to fund the massive shortfall in gas tax revenues for transportation through controversial increases in oil drilling and speculative energy exploration.
It’s encouraging to hear House leaders say they intend to move forward with adopting a multiyear investment plan for transportation infrastructure that moves away from a 30 percent cut and toward full funding. But attaching the transportation bill to deeply contentious drilling proposals could lead to partisan gridlock and sidetrack long overdue transportation legislation — a stark contrast to the transportation bill marked up in the Senate just last week with a unanimous bipartisan vote.
While the Speaker’s press conference this morning was very short on details about the length or price of the bill, they did make it clear that their intent is to try and cover the shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund through expanded oil drilling and exploration. That plan would certainly face immediate opposition from Democrats and moderates in the House and Senate.
There are serious questions, however about the amount of funding that could be raised over the next five years through this approach. As Sen. James Inhofe — the Republican co-sponsor of the Senate’s bipartisan bill – has noted, it is unlikely drilling-related revenues would come close to closing the existing transportation funding gap, and would not be available for several years. (New oil drilling could bring in perhaps a billion dollars over the life of the energy bills, and not for several years, according to recent scoring by the Congressional Budget Office. The shortfall is well over $50 billion over the life of this bill.)
In his response, Sen. Inhofe made it clear that expecting new oil drilling revenues to pay for an immediate multi-year transportation bill isn’t a realistic funding solution for this bill.
“While Speaker Boehner’s idea may be a long-term revenue source for transportation infrastructure,” Inhofe said, “we need to focus on the immediate problem of how we will fund a multi-year highway bill. …If this is how the House is able to move the bill forward then I applaud them. But we need money now for transportation; we can’t afford to wait.”
Calling the transportation bill an “important Republican jobs initiative”, Rep. John L. Mica (R-FL), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, offered his priorities for authorization in a statement:
“It is my hope to mark up in the coming weeks a solid blueprint for the future of America’s transportation that will do the following: significantly streamline the process for projects by cutting red tape and unnecessary federal paperwork; consolidate duplicative federal transportation programs; provide flexibility, authority and responsibility to states and local governments to move transportation projects forward; and increase the ability to leverage financial resources and encourage more private sector participation in building infrastructure.”
Transportation for America has long advocated for the idea of tying the bill to an “oil fee” in the past. Our proposal was quite different, though, designed to ensure that any additional revenue from a fee on oil would increase the efficiency of the transportation system and help give people expanded options that can reduce the nation’s oil dependency. This idea received majority support from the public in a poll of ours, and two-thirds of those polled supported if it came with a cut in the tax at the pump.
Because details of the bill have not been released, it’s unknown whether any new revenue would be applied to a sound investment strategy. We look forward to an opportunity to review the draft legislation and will continue to work with transportation leaders in the House and Senate to see that a bill gets enacted as soon as possible.
The American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act will be H.R 7, a number reserved for one of the Speaker’s bills, when it moves sometime before the end of the year, according to the timeline presented today.
Today’s Headlines – 11/17/11
November 17, 2011By Transportation for America
Speaker John Boehner and House Republicans are unveiling a five-year transportation bill this morning, with a not-yet-announced funding source. (Transpo Nation)
The nation’s highways are expected to be as crowded as ever during Thanksgiving weekend, according to AAA. (CNN)
Roads in the San Francisco Bay Area are among the most congested. (San Francisco Chronicle)
A new Lymmo bus line in Orlando will link downtown to the Creative Village development. (Sentinel)
And, the financially-stretched Wyoming department of transportation is halting new highway construction. (Streetsblog Capitol Hill)
Today’s Headlines – 11/16/11
November 16, 2011By Transportation for America
A House transportation bill is “70 to 80 percent completed,” according to Chairman John Mica. (The Hill)
A Republican member of the House transportation committee from upstate New York made the case for a six-year bill. (Politico)
Demand for TIGER grants continues to far outpace supply. (Journal of Commerce)
Truckers are mobilizing against gas tax increases at the state level. (Land Line Magazine)
And, Florida transportation officials are pushing for more tolling to fill revenue gaps. (Florida Times-Union)
Transit and TIGER funding preserved in compromise spending bill
November 15, 2011By Sean Barry
Leading negotiators in the House and Senate released a compromise spending bill to fund the U.S. Department of Transportation, alongside several other departments, through the end of the current fiscal year in September 2012. The measure is known as a “minibus” because it collapses several appropriations bills into one package,
The conference agreement between the two chambers preserves funding for transit and the innovative TIGER grants program, while zeroing out high-speed rail. The Federal Transit Administration is provided a total of $10.608 billion. Amtrak, with $466 million for operating and $952 million for capital, would be funded at a level lower than what the Senate requested but higher than the House-proposed amount. But Amtrak did receive more capital funding than either the House or Senate originally proposed.
$500 million for TIGER constitutes a 5.1 percent cut from current levels, but is a significant improvement over the House proposal to eliminate the program entirely. Every round of grant applications for TIGER has yielded far more interest from communities that USDOT has been able to accommodate, and the program rewards projects that meet local needs. Streetsblog is reporting that the third round of TIGER applications outstrips the available grant amount by 27 to 1.
The New Starts program receives $1.95 billion. New Starts is a key funding source for transit projects across the country, particularly in large metropolitan areas. The WMATA transit system in Washington, DC gets $150 million.
Traditional highway funding under the Federal Highway Administration is funded slightly below current levels, with $39.143 billion.
In a disappointing move, negotiators did not include funding for Partnership for Sustainable Communities grants. The partnership is a joint venture between USDOT, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. While no new grants will be awarded under this agreement, the office will remain open and negotiators notably refused to include House-proposed language that would have disallowed the three departments from working collaboratively.
Both chambers will need to pass the “minibus” agreement by Friday to avoid a government shutdown. With bipartisan sign-off on these funding levels, passage is almost assured.
Check out the chart below, which compares the 2010 budget, 2011 budget and the House/Senate proposals that got us to the proposed 2012 budget.
Federal Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Budget: Highlighted transportation and sustainable communities programs.
| Program | 2010 Budget | 2011 Budget | House 2012 Proposal | Senate 2012 Proposal | Final 2012 Budget | Difference: 2012 vs 2011 |
| Federal-Aid Highways | ~$42B | $41.1B | $27.7B | $41.1 B (FY 2011 enacted) | $39.14 B (equal to MAP-21) | —$2.B |
| Transit Formula Grants | ~$8.3B | $8.34B | $5.2 | $8.36B | $8.36 B | +$20M |
| High Speed Rail | $2.5B | $0 | $0 | $100M | $0 | — |
| TIGER | $600M | $527M | $0 | $550M | $500M | —$27M |
| Partnership for Sustainable Communities Grants | $150M | $100M | $0 | $90M | $0 | —$100M |
| Amtrak Capital | $1.002B | $922M | $898M | $937M | $952M | +30M |
| Amtrak Operating | $563M | $562M | $227M | $544M | 466M | —$97M |
| Transit ‘New Starts’ | $2.0B | $1.6B | $1.55B | $1.955B | $1.955B | +$355M |
| TIGGER (energy efficiency grants for transit agencies) | $75M | $50M | $0M | $25M | $0 | —$50M |
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- The more they see, the less they like: 10 reasons why opposition to the House transportation bill is growing
February 21, 2012 - Crucial amendment could improve Senate bill, restore local control and help make streets safer
February 14, 2012 - Oppose House bill that slashes public transit funding, falls short on repair and axes bike & pedestrian safety
February 7, 2012 - T4 coalition announces opposition to House energy and transportation bill
February 6, 2012 - House committee ignores broad opposition, decimates transit funding anyway
February 3, 2012
- The more they see, the less they like: 10 reasons why opposition to the House transportation bill is growing
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