Appropriations Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Transportation For America

As the House aims to slash, tell the Senate to protect money for rail, transit & TIGER in next week’s budget vote

The two chambers of Congress at the moment are looking at very different paths for funding transportation.

The House path — though stopping short of cutting all funding by a third as proposed in the past — slashes passenger rail funding by $400 million, eliminates money for the innovative TIGER grants, and reduces the funding communities depend on for new transit projects.

Meanwhile, a Senate committee has drafted a budget that increases funding for new transit construction, keeps and expands TIGER, provides support for Amtrak and passenger rail improvements, and funds a new grant program to jumpstart progress on repairing critical bridges.

Can you take a moment to write your two Senators and tell them to support this smart budget in the Senate? It’s likely to come up for a vote next week.

The House transportation budget is unabashedly bad, and the only way to counter it is with a strong Senate alternative.

The Senate proposal embraces the reality that communities everywhere are looking for smart ways to keep people and goods moving, promote prosperity and keep their infrastructure in good shape. The House would thwart them on every front.

The Senate budget acknowledges that Amtrak ridership is breaking records and that Americans deserve a convenient rail option. It acts to do something about the fact that we take 260 million trips each day over deficient bridges that urgently need repairs.

So let’s make sure that the Senate hears this message loud and clear: Face up to reality and pass a transportation budget that funds solutions to our problems, whether it’s fixing bridges or providing more viable ways to get around.

Take action today and tell your Senators to vote for this budget.

Key Senate committee recognizes the importance of passenger rail, TIGER, transit and repairing our nation’s bridges

Less than a week after the release of The Fix We’re In For — our report on the nation’s bridges showing that one in nine US bridges are structurally deficient — a key Senate committee passed a yearly funding bill that provides new money for repairing these deficient bridges across the country.

The Senate’s Transportation, Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill reported out of the Appropriations Committee this week specifically provides more money to invest in repairing bridges on key corridors.

The $500 million in the bill dedicated specifically to bridge repair is a step in the right direction toward prioritizing the repair of our more than 66,000 structurally deficient bridges.

Transportation for America commends Senator Patty Murray, Senator Susan Collins and the rest of the committee for recognizing the importance of investing in all of our bridges — not just a small segment of them. That’s a key difference between this $500 million and the policy created in last summer’s transportation bill (MAP-21.)

As we pointed out in last week’s report, 90 percent of the country’s structurally deficient bridges were left behind by MAP-21, which made tens of thousands of deficient bridges ineligible for receiving repair dollars from the largest highway program.

For the $500 million for bridge repair in this appropriations bill, almost all highway bridges are eligible to receive dollars for repair, not just a small slice of our country’s bridges. The committee recognizes that the connections these other bridges make in our transportation network are often just as important as our biggest, busiest interstate bridges.

In addition, this money for bridge repair will be provided via a competitive grant program to ensure that it goes to the most vital needs on corridors that are crucial to moving goods and people, in urban and rural areas alike.

Yet new money for bridge repair is far from the only highlight in yesterday’s appropriations bill. There’s also $1.75 billion for rail programs, with $1.45 billion of that intended for Amtrak operations and capital investments – coming a year after Amtrak carried over 31 million passengers and grew their ridership more than 60 percent since 1998, according to the committee release, and another $100 million for passenger rail capital grants to improve service.

The competitive TIGER grant program also got another round of full funding to the tune of $550 million — grants for innovative transportation projects that often cross state lines and combine transit, freight, safety or other diverse uses, and are often hard to fund under older, rigid federal and state programs.

There is also almost $2 billion for investing in new or expanded public transportation across the country through the New Starts transit program.

This bill will head to the full Senate next, but there will be contentious negotiations ahead with the House, which has lower overall funding levels and drastically different ideas for some of these specific programs: No extra money for bridge repair, a significant cut for Amtrak, slightly less money for public transportation and zero dollars for the popular TIGER grant program.

The impacts of sequestration: comparing 2012 to 2013

If your head is spinning from trying to figure out what sequestration, the “continuing budget resolution,” and the myriad proposed budgets have on transportation funding, this simple chart is for you.

This helpful chart shows the notable recent spending plans and compares each of them to what was spent on transportation in 2012, for the key programs that we care about.

There’s still a lot there, so let’s break down what’s there and simplify it. The first column shows what was approved for spending in 2012. These appropriations bills were passed before MAP-21 passed last summer, so 2012 mostly represents the levels authorized by SAFETEA-LU. This is the baseline we’re using for comparing to the 2013 spending.

The second column is the 2013 budget proposed by the Senate in the last (112th) Congress.

The third column is the spending levels established by MAP-21. Keep in mind that the standing transportation law just “authorizes” funding levels — the money still has to be “appropriated” each year. But typically, appropriators follow the levels laid out within the current transportation law for the most part.

The fourth column is the important one to pay attention to, because this is where all the cuts that are part of “sequestration” have been made. This is the “continuing budget resolution” that the Senate and then the House passed in just the last few weeks. A CR, as its known, just extends spending authority ahead through a certain amount of time — usually when Congress can’t agree to write a proper new annual budget before the current one expires. It’s a stopgap measure. A CR usually keeps funding at the same level and almost never changes policy, but in this case, there are cuts in the CR, and most of these are due to sequestration, which required cuts to all discretionary funding.

The last column shows the difference between the funding for transportation in 2012 vs 2013, comparing the first column with the fourth. Hopefully this provides some clarity for a confusing issue.

Would you like to download this chart as a sharable PDF? Find that here.

Program	2012 funding levels	Senate's draft 2013 proposal (112th Congress)	MAP-21 authorized	2013 CR (implements sequestration)	Difference: 2013 v. 2012 funding levels
Federal-Aid Highways	$39.1B	$39.1B	$39.7BB	$39.7B	$600M
Transit Formula Grants	$8.36B	$8.36B	$8.5B	$8.5B	$10M
Transit Capital Grants (New Starts)	$1.955B	$2B	$1.9B	$1.86B	—$95M
High Speed Rail/High Performance Passenger Rail	$0 (HSR)	$100M from PRIIA	PRIIA has jurisidction	$0	$0
Amtrak Capital*	$952M	$1.05B	PRIIA has jurisidction	$904M	—$48M
Amtrak Operating*	$466M	$400M	PRIIA has jurisidction	$442.5M	—$23.5M
TIGER	$500M	$500M	Not authorized	$475M	—$25M
Partnership for Sustainable Communities Grants	$0	$50M		$0	$0
Projects of National and Regional Significance (PNRS)	Did not exist – created under MAP-21		$500M	$0	$0 (or —$500M from MAP-21)
Hurricane Sandy FTA Emergency Transit Funding	$10.9B			$10.35B	—$545M
Hurricane Sandy Amtrak Emergency Funds	$118M			$112M	—$6M
Hurricane Sandy FHWA Emergency Highway Funds	$2B			$1.9B	—$100M

Senate budget restores some sanity to transportation programs

Just a few weeks after Rep. Paul Ryan released his House budget that proposed cutting or eliminating many important transportation programs, the key Senate committee’s budget for transportation (and housing) for next year contains some good news. Thanks to all of you who sent emails last week to your Senators on the committee!

TIGER, one of the most important programs that communities depend on to fund innovative local transportation projects, was well funded after the House proposal totally eliminated it in their budget.

Whether repairing a pair of deficient bridges that connect two communities in Michigan, extending transit service into an underserved area in Orlando, improving a busy rail crossroads in Texas to move freight faster cross-country, or bringing different modes of transportation together under a brand new roof in Moline, Illinois, the competitive TIGER grant program has been a huge boon to more than 130 communities, funding many innovative projects that often have a hard time getting funding from the state DOT or federal formulas.

New Starts, the small, oversubscribed program that funds almost all new transit construction across the country, was funded at a little more than $2 billion after being also totally eliminated by the House. It’s a prudent move: transit usage is booming across the country while vehicle miles traveled peaked a few years ago and has been slowly declining ever since — especially among people under age 34.

And the small but very influential Partnership for Sustainable Communities was funded again after receiving no funding last year. This program brings together the federal environmental, housing and transportation agencies to make decisions in concert and make small grants to communities that want to engage in better planning to ensure that their communities become or remain great places to live.

This doesn’t mean that the fight is over for this year — this budget will still have to be reconciled with the House, which is no easy feat. And we’ll have a battle at that point once more. It’s been tougher and tougher in the last few years to pass actual budgets for these individual programs. This year will be no different, especially heading into an election this fall.

The full list of notable programs and their funding levels:

Highways: $39.1 billion.
Transit: The summary doesn’t explicitly give an amount but it’s fairly safe to assume that it’s $8.4 billion, in line with MAP-21 levels, just as the above funding for highways matches MAP-21.
TIGER: $500 million
New Starts: $2.05 billion. This is the core program that funds construction of new and expanded transit systems.
Amtrak: $1.45 billion
Passenger Rail Grants: $100 million
Partnership for Sustainable Communities: $50 million

Are you confused about the difference between the long-term transportation bill and these yearly budget battles? In short, it’s the difference between “authorizations” and “appropriations.” The multi-year transportation bill is an authorization, which means the policy is put on paper and the targeted overall funding amounts are determined. We are still working to see that multi-year bill passed with important policy reforms. But in the meantime as we roll along under extension after extension of the old law, it’s still up to appropriators in the House and Senate each year to decide how much money to actually spend on transportation —especially how to divvy up the discretionary money between different programs, like Amtrak, TIGER grants, or high-speed rail, just to name a few.

The House proposes painful cuts to transportation, but the Senate still has a chance to repair them now

Senate Appropriations Committee members list. Take action if you see your state listed.

Alabama – Richard Shelby
Alaska – Lisa Murkowski
Arkansas – Mark Pryor
California – Dianne Feinstein
Hawaii – Daniel Inouye
Illinois – Dick Durbin
Illinois – Mark Kirk
Indiana – Dan Coats
Iowa – Tom Harkin
Kansas – Jerry Moran
Kentucky – Mitch McConnell
Louisiana – Mary Landrieu
Maine – Susan Collins
Maryland – Barbara Mikulski
Mississippi – Thad Cochran
Missouri – Roy Blunt
Montana – Jon Tester
Nebraska – Ben Nelson
New Jersey – Frank Lautenberg
North Dakota – John Hoeven
Ohio – Sherrod Brown
Rhode Island – Jack Reed
South Carolina – Lindsey Graham
South Dakota – Tim Johnson
Tennessee – Lamar Alexander
Texas – Kay Bailey Hutchison
Vermont – Patrick Leahy
Washington – Patty Murray
Wisconsin – Herb Kohl
Wisconsin – Ron Johnson

Just a few weeks ago, Rep. Paul Ryan and the House released their budget for next year, and it proposed painful cuts to important transportation programs that our local communities depend on.

The TIGER grant program that rewards innovative local transportation projects, funding for new transit systems, passenger rail funding, and the office of sustainable communities that helps our towns and cities plan better for the future all were either slashed or eliminated.

Mr. Ryan and the House made it clear — making much needed transportation investments in our communities is not a priority to them.

But there’s a chance to make things better: Senate appropriators are writing their budget right now and they need to know that we’re counting on them to put together a better budget for transportation.

If you live in one of the states with a Senator on this powerful Appropriations Committee, can you take a minute to send them a short letter?

The small TIGER grant program has helped more than 130 communities build innovative transportation projects that are often ignored by the federal or state government — projects that improve freight rail, help give people more options to get around, fix broken bridges, or make walking or biking safer, just to name a few.

As we wait for the House to take action on the big multi-year transportation bill extended yet one more time until June, they still have to decide how much money to spend on transportation each year.

While it’s important to find ways to reduce spending, many of these important programs are being unfairly targeted by House members who are out of touch with what their constituents want and need from transportation: safe places to walk or bike, travel options that let us avoid pain at the pump, and bridges and roads that get repaired before we spend money on new things we can’t afford.

Yet the House is proposing to cut or eliminate the very programs that help do these things.

Help us defend them by writing your Senator today.

House appropriators make deep cuts to transportation for 2012

The House Appropriations Committee released their draft bill for 2012 spending in the transportation program, and the cuts are severe, with some key programs facing more of a reduction than others.

The Transportation, Housing and Urban Development spending bill, or THUD, as its called, contained similar cuts for transit and road/bridge spending that we saw in Rep. Ryan’s budget earlier this year. Transit and highway spending both get cut proportionally, around 34 percent.

While cuts are proportional in those main two areas, other areas and innovative programs face deeper cuts.The innovative TIGER grants, TIGGER grants and high-speed rail programs are cut entirely.

The New Starts transit program, which essentially funds all new transit system construction, gets cut to $1.55 billion down from $2 billion in FY10. In addition, a policy tweak is made that requires state or local funds to make up more than 50 percent of any new grant agreements. Or put another way, the feds will no longer cover more than half of any New Starts transit project, exacerbating an existing gap between the share the government will pay for transit vs. highway projects. (Highway projects get around 80 percent of their funds from the federal government.)

Existing passenger rail service faces deep cuts of its own. Amtrak’s capital budget (new rolling stock, new lines, equipment, etc.) is cut by $24 million, but the operations budget is where Amtrak takes a big hit, going from $563 million to $227 million. On top of that, an important policy change will prevent Amtrak from using any of their operating funds on state-supported lines — lines where a state has partnered with Amtrak to increase passenger rail service and ridership. To put that change in perspective, in 2010 9 million rides were taken on state-supported routes.

Amtrak State-Supported routes, from the T&I Committee “A New Direction” report (pdf).

Another notable policy change is for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The bill prohibits HUD from using any funding for anything related to the Sustainable Communities Partnership with DOT and the EPA. Essentially, this bill would require HUD to stop coordinating with the other two agencies and go back to the outdated siloed approach on housing, ignoring the effects on and the impacts of transportation and the environment.

The silver lining is that it’s unlikely that this appropriations bill will make it through the full process to passage anytime soon. Instead, Congress will likely pass a continuing resolution (CR) before September 30 to stop the government from shutting down — which means at least for a while, the 2012 funding levels could be more in line with last year’s levels, preventing some of these cuts. Whether it passes or not, it’s important to note that this is the House appropriators opening position on transportation funding for next year.

Here’s a full list with details on the cuts.

Cuts highway funding from ~$41B to $27B
Cuts transit funding (excluding New Starts) from $8.3B to $5.3B
Cuts New Starts from $1.6B to $1.55B and requires that any new grant agreement include at least at 50% non-federal share; Note, FY10 New Starts funding was $2B, separate cuts were made last year.
Includes funding for Washington’s Metro system – $150M
No funding for TIGER, HSR, or TIGGER (transit energy efficiency grants)
Prohibits any new RRIF (a loan program like TIFIA for rail projects) loans or loan guarantees.
Cuts Amtrak capital funding from $922M to $898M; FY10 funding was $1,002M
Cuts Amtrak operating funding from $563M to $227M

What do the House rule changes mean for transportation spending?

Earlier this week the House adopted rules for this new session of Congress. It’s a bit of inside baseball that can be hard to decipher, but these rules determine how bills are considered by lawmakers and what bills can and cannot do. Streetsblog Capitol Hill covered this issue on Monday and today, but it’s worth a closer examination.

One of the new rules will definitely have two significant impacts on transportation spending.

First, it would subject transportation spending to the annual appropriations process. Basically this means that instead of having transportation funding be more or less automatically tied to spending determined by the six-year transportation law, appropriators in Congress would decide funding levels each year — likely lower than what the transportation bill “authorized” and potentially leaving money unspent in the highway trust fund each year.

Since 1998 during the last two transportation laws (SAFETEA-LU and TEA-21), appropriators have been required by House rules to fund overall transportation programs at the aggregate levels written into the authorization, like current law SAFETEA-LU. This change will allow congressional appropriators to fund transportation below funding levels authorized in the transportation law or even below gas tax receipts.

While the new rule won’t actually allow diversions of transportation dollars to non-transportation uses as some highway advocacy groups claimed last week, it nevertheless poses some significant issues. It would have an impact on the economy and on local projects that rely on the certainty of guaranteed funding to bid out contracts and build projects. It could create even more uncertainty than we already have with the continued stopgap extensions.

There’s no doubt that the highway trust fund isn’t covering what we need to spend as general funds have been used to shore up the trust fund in the past few years. But cutting transportation spending even further won’t solve the real problems, namely that the money — whether it’s more or less than before — is too often given out to states with no strings attached and no accountability for what that money should accomplish.

We need a better program that spends money wisely to meet the needs we have in 2010, not just a cheaper one.

Second, the new rule would prohibit the Appropriations Committee from funding any program not specifically authorized in law. This means that innovative programs that were created outside the six-year transportation authorization like TIGER or the Bush Administration’s Urban Partnership Program wouldn’t receive funding from the trust fund because they were new programs not included in the transportation authorization. (The UP program was the source of funding for congestion pricing in New York, before that project fell apart locally.)

In the last 8 years, both Republican and Democratic presidents have developed creative programs like these to better address our nation’s transportation needs. If this rule had been in place these two programs would not have been funded and projects like the Norfolk-Southern’s Crescent Corridor and Minneapolis’s I-35 multimodal corridor improvements among others could not have moved forward.