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Big rifts on transportation bills
By: Adam Snider and Burgess Everett - Politico
January 30, 2012 05:42 PM EST
With two months remaining to get a long-term surface transportation bill done, the House and Senate are racing this week to mark up several portions of their dueling legislation. And though the process is just beginning, there are already major rifts between the chambers.
Lawmakers are playing up the similarities in public — the annual funding levels are close enough, they say — and transportation leaders continue to express cautious optimism. But when pressed, senators and representatives are unhappy with a number of major differences, including how the bills are paid for and how long they last.
The differences mean that while everyone POLITICO spoke with — whether in Congress, the administration, lobbyists or transportation advocates — thinks the opportunity to get a surface transportation bill signed by the president is a real one after more than 850 days of stopgaps, there’s still plenty of opportunity for things to go awry.
A number of markups start this week on Capitol Hill, with the Senate pushing a two-year, $109 billion effort and the House bill expected to clock in at five years and $260 billion. And that’s before you get to the policy differences, like the GOP effort to use oil-drilling revenue to pay for part of it.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who’s leading the Senate effort at the Environment and Public Works Committee, has called the House’s pay-for — expanded energy exploration, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a “nonstarter.”
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) has said the Senate’s two-year bill is merely an “extension” that spends down the already low Highway Trust Fund balance. In fact, if Mica had it his way, it would be a six-year bill, because he emphasizes large local projects can take significantly longer than two years to complete. He’s not the only Republican opposed to the Senate tack.
“A two-year bill … what are we doing?” said senior T&I member (and former chairman) Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska).
Mica wanted a longer-term bill at current funding levels — which means he needs more money. “He has a problem of funding, and that’s going to be an issue,” Young said of Mica. “There’s a group of congressmen that think there’s going to be a magic wand to create funds.”
The opposing sentiments provoked a theatrical couple of days for Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who on Wednesday told a transportation conference, “We’ll probably have to wait until next year to get to a surface transportation bill because of the huge differences,” causing a minor uproar on Capitol Hill and eliciting a telephone call from Boxer on Thursday.
After the California senator spoke to the secretary, LaHood clarified his earlier remarks, telling Washington Auto Show reporters, “I want to make sure everybody understands the Senate has worked hard on a transportation bill, and they’re bringing their bill to the floor.” He was largely silent on the House bill.
“We’ve got the president, we’ve got the chairman in the House, we’ve got the chairman in the Senate all talking about a surface transport bill. Hallelujah!” added LaHood.
It’s not simply a House-Senate dispute — there’s also some good old-fashioned Democrat-Republican head-butting. A number of House Democrats have said they’d prefer Boxer’s bill over the House’s version, especially when it comes to overall funding levels.
“I will not be supportive of a five- or six-year bill at current levels. That just won’t get the job done unless there is a mandatory re-opener after two years,” said Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, the transportation committee’s top Democrat, echoing groups such as Building America’s Future, and President Barack Obama, who pushed a six-year, $556 billion proposal last year.
“In two years, who knows, we may find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” Rahall added.
Rahall also said the expected House call for a 25 percent reduction in Amtrak subsidies would make the bill a tough sell to the Senate, “to put it mildly.”
Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a huge rail proponent from urban New Jersey, said, “We’d fight anything like that, because Amtrak funding now is the alternative to the continuous stream of polluted air that comes out of tailpipes, that has us so dependent on foreign oil as opposed to the efficiency of rail systems.”
Boxer and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) maintain that squabbling about the differences in the bill now is not productive.
“Our goal has always been don’t worry so much about the details of the bill, let’s try to get it passed and go into conference and come up with a reauthorization bill,” Inhofe said.
“There’s something called a conference committee,” Boxer said last week, emphasizing she has a good relationship with Mica and the two have spoken about a readiness to work together.
And as one of the most important weeks regarding transportation descends on Washington, infrastructure stakeholders are mostly sitting back and waiting. Just like the lawmakers focused on getting bills through each chamber, stakeholders are taking things one step at a time.
“The Chamber is taking what we call separate but equal strategy,” said Janet Kavinoky, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s top transportation lobbyist. “We’ll worry about the overall length once there’s a conference.”
“Congress doesn’t work the way it used to,” Kavinoky added. “Now you know something is real when something is going to be marked up.”
“At this point, the length of the bill seems less important than just getting something done,” said Jill Ingrassia, AAA’s managing director of government relations. “Getting the bills to conference would be a huge step and will be the only way to sort out whether any of the options are viable with the majority of members in Congress.”
But there is concern about staying away from “poison pills” that could torpedo the bill. These include the Amtrak subsidy cut or several energy measures that could help offset the cost: ANWR drilling and approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which Speaker John Boehner hinted Sunday could be attached to the House legislation.
“We are very concerned that attaching contentious provisions to a bill that has traditionally earned broad support could short-circuit discussion on what the spending actually should accomplish, and make it all the more difficult to pass a bipartisan measure that makes the best use of taxpayers’ money,” said Transportation for America Communications Director David Goldberg.
It’s something on Boxer’s mind as well. She championed the give-and-take that resulted in a unanimous November EPW markup of the Senate’s highway portion of the bill and is encouraging the House to follow that lead.
“Reach out to the Democrats, have a bipartisan bill,” Boxer said. “If you load this bill with very controversial items, it takes us right back to the debate and the arguments rather than progress the American people expect of us.”
If the drilling used to pay for the bill was in already approved areas, “that’s fine; if they start saying we want to start drilling in states that don’t want it … that’s very controversial,” she said.
Inhofe, though a supporter of domestic energy production, said the House shouldn’t be using it to pay for highways. “You can’t very well use revenues you don’t have,” he said last week. And there have been rumblings among conservatives that by using energy production for funding, the gas tax will be unhitched from infrastructure funding and later require aid from the general fund. Taxpayers have already bailed out the Highway Trust Fund to the tune of $35 billion over the past few years.