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Tag: omnibus

Stories You May Have Missed – Week of July 14th

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week.

  • The Transportation and Housing Appropriations (THUD) bill was released last week and it proposes to eliminate the TIGER program and decrease funding for other important programs, including New Starts and Small Starts. See T4A’s full member summary here.
  • last week USDOT put out a notice for approximately $226.5 million in funding for the Bus and Bus Facilities Infrastructure Investment competitive grant program. Applications must be submitted by August 25, 2017. (USDOT)
  • The full House Appropriations Committee will markup the Transportation and Housing Appropriations (THUD) bill on Monday July 17th. (House Appropriations Committee)
  • House Republicans are looking at passing all 12 appropriations bills, including the transportation and housing appropriations bills, in one large “omnibus” package before the August recess. (The Hill)
  • The House Budget Committee will mark up their fiscal year 2018 budget resolution in Committee on Wednesday. The resolution is expected to include special instructions directing committees to start working on tax reform, potentially allowing tax reform to pass in the Senate with 50 votes, instead of the usually required 60 votes. It is still unlikely that tax reform will be used to fund an infrastructure package. (The Hill)
  • The Bipartisan Policy Center explores what “asset recycling” is and the potential benefits and challenges. (Bipartisan Policy Center)
  • The Nation Magazine comes out strongly against asset recycling and articulates why they just view it as another form of privatization. (The Nation)
  • Des Moines Register Editorial: “Trump’s infrastructure plan isn’t a plan at all.” (Des Moines Register)

Congress permanently increases commuter tax benefit for transit riders

After years of effort from T4America, the Association for Commuter Transportation and scores of others, in late 2015, Congress finally raised the pre-tax benefit that can be claimed for commuting via transit, permanently equalizing that fringe tax benefit with the benefit for parking expenses.

This news got a little buried in the wake of the passage of the Fast Act, the new five-year transportation bill, but it’s an important change that will have notable impacts on how people choose to commute.

A provision in the annual spending and tax extender package, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama at the end of 2015, permanently establishes tax parity between drivers and transit riders. This means transit, vanpool, and parking will all receive pre-tax commuter benefit deductions of $255 a month in 2016. Though the benefit for transit riders had been temporarily increased to match parking benefits several times over the last few years, for most of the last decade, the value of the transit benefit was around half the value of the parking benefit — effectively putting a thumb on the scale for millions of people making a choice of how they’d like to commute.

These stacked financial incentives surely had an impact on commuting decisions, adding more congestion to roads and hurting low- and middle-income taxpayers in particular — people more likely to depend on transit, but under the former setup, receiving less tax benefits to do so.

As a longstanding and vocal advocate for permanently making these benefit equal and providing benefits to commuters, no matter how they choose to commute, Transportation for America celebrates this moment for commuters and for the positive impacts that it could have in communities across the country through increased transit ridership and cost savings.