The Friday Night (or Thursday Morning) fights, that’s a good way of looking at the highway bill during this recess week, a whole string of opponents squaring off against their opposites. Let’s take a look at some of these match-ups:
- The marquee match is between the House and the Senate versions of the transportation bill. I might not be the only one that has to remind myself of how a bill gets made, if you’re in the same camp recall that a piece of legislation moves through both chambers, from appropriate committee to floor vote, and only then, once it passes each chamber, does it ‘go to conference’ to hammer out the differences between the two, and then to the President’s desk for signing into law. In this case, there are healthy similarities between the House and the Senate version for the simple reason that there are pros in both chambers who are passionate about transportation and have been working like dogs for months, and the challenges and opportunities of transportation are well known. They do however, at this point, differ widely on transit issues, the linkage to energy revenues in the House version, the tacking on of Keystone XL Pipeline related issues in the House version, and the duration of the funding, five years in the House version – much preferred by state DOTs and other transportation professionals – and two years in the Senate. Let’s take on a few of these differences here, because a couple of them are doozies, the differing approaches to transit, and the link to energy. See the next bullet.
- The fight between current transit funding methods and a newly proposed spinoff of same. The House version as it stands now, here in this interim week, seeks to eliminate (over time) the historic split of gas tax revenues between highways and mass transit, currently at an 80/20 level, authorizing a one-time payment of $40 billion from the General Fund into all other transportation programs (mass transit included), leaving transit, upon the exhaustion of that $40 billion, left to fend for itself in competition with other government programs. The bad outcomes of this provision are manifest, and almost too lengthy to list.
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- Agencies will lose a good deal of their ability to plan long-term, multi-year projects, secure in the knowledge of guaranteed Federal funds far into the future
- Agencies will become vulnerable to the politics of annual federal appropriations, one of the most contentious activities that takes place these days, undertaken by contentious people, driven by contentious forces
- States, cities and the private sector will find their own financing of agencies more vulnerable as one of the legs of combined financing is kicked out from under them
- The bond-rating agencies have made clear that they will raise the cost of borrowing on transportation-related bonds if the measure passes, impacting the bonding ability of Agencies and city and states.
- The arguments for the measure come down to preserving the gas tax revenues for the users that are traveling over the transportation assets themselves, which sounds good in theory but will have very negative practical implications.
Hardly anyone expects that this measure, as is, will make it into the final bill that comes out of the conference committee between the House and the Senate (resuming both are passed out of their chambers), nor even necessarily into the final House bill after it is debated. What is troubling to observers is that now that it is on the table and has been put into writing, the current standing of the split in funding may suddenly seem to be open to compromise….which is exactly what the conference committee does: reconcile and compromise.
Other measures have come and gone in the course of this legislative process – only a few days ago a measure to raise the allowable weight of trucks was on the table, then it got removed and kicked down the road for a three year study – but advocates of transit – including Agencies, cities and states, users, friends of transit generally, not to mention guys like us – are activating their opposition vigorously at this time so that their voices are heard. The Northeast Corridor lobbies, and their Representatives and Senators, are powerful forces, and are out in force on this matter.
- The fight between funding sources, to energy or not to energy? The House version, powerfully influenced by the party that holds that chamber, the Republicans, ties the transportation bill to an energy bill, in short, seeking to gain additional monies to reasonably fund transportation by the selling of oil and gas leases. I don’t know the ins and outs of selling oil and gas leases, I can say with confidence that there’s plenty of fine peoplewho don’t like a thing about any transportation proposal (or other) that has the words ‘drilling,’ ‘oil or gas leases,’ or ‘tied to energy revenues’ in it. That’s a fact of life these days, and it’s part and parcel of what the House is proposing.
- The next big match is between the ideological spreads between the members of both chambers. I have become accustomed to repeating what an economist friend of mind says, that there are really four major parties in the country today, the two major parties, and then for each, the ideologically committed wing of their own party. This has special application to the House, some of whose members would as soon do without a highway bill at all as to spend one more dime on it. Regardless of the width of the spread, the leaders in both chambers need to muster enough votes to pass the damned bill, and so must accommodate opposing forces at least to the degree you’d need to to get a member’s vote.
- There’s a rift between rural and urban members in both chambers, this having been in place since the founding of the country I suppose. It ties into the transit funding issues noted above, suffice to say rural members, with a responsibility to their constituents, see scant reason why the gas tax dollars, the Federal dollars that is, collected in their states, should go to fund a transit line somewhere on the east coast.
- Tied to this is the ‘devolving’ argument, which takes various forms, but which seeks to either push more responsibility and power down to the states in a broad-based manner that puts the decision-making closest to the point of actual use, or at the far end, seeks to simply keep the tax revenues generated in that state…in that state.
- The fight between doing another extension (the bill is on its seventh extension and officially ‘ran out’ a couple years back) or getting a bill passed. Problem with doing another extension is…
- The battle between the calendar and the decline in gas tax revenues, which is one thing when you see the gradual decline from the tax over the years as an interesting fiscal phenomena, and something entirely different when you realize that outlays are going to overtake income in 2014 and the trust fund will be broke-o. That’s why everyone is scrambling to get revenue sources, such as ties to energy leases, in place.
- The fight between managing this legislative process with earmarks and without earmarks. You might tell me that this battle is won, as earmarks have been abolished in both chamber’s versions, but you have to wonder how many years that will last. When Rep. Boehner opened up the floor discussion to amendments on the House bill – and received 300 or so – that was a direct result of not being able to direct earmarked funds to win lawmakers over and having to shift the discussion to the amendment process. That didn’t seem to go very well.
- The battle between ‘the sound and the fury,’ and actually getting something done. Plenty of fine people have plenty of smart things to say about this bill, and they come from an honest and committed place. However…..however, at some point Congress will need to pass a national transportation bill or sink even further in the estimation of their constituents, right now at or around the level of bedbugs.
Next week the action picks up again after this week of wheeling and dealing, there will be different tones within and across the two chambers, the various committees and the fine people staffing them will be communicating in torrents directly rather than through press conferences, and the Ven diagrams will begin to overlap, then merge.
That’s the betting here, at least. Stay tuned, we’ll keep you in the loop. – Larry McGurn