Obama to call for spending to improve nation’s roads and rails

Courtesy of Washington Post, By Scott Wilson: President Obama will call on Congress on Wednesday to act swiftly to approve billions of dollars in funding for the nation’s aging roads, bridges and rail systems, warning that a failure to do so may cost the economy 700,000 jobs.

The event will be held at the Tappan Zee Bridge, which spans the Hudson River north of Manhattan. The venue is meant to highlight a federal loan program that helps states replace aging roads and bridges such as the Tappan Zee, now nearly six decades old and carrying far more traffic than originally intended.

Obama’s remarks will be the most public in a series of appearances that senior administration officials are making this week to highlight the need for new spending on languishing projects on highways, airports and more.

Obama has argued that improving transportation services is a key to short-term job growth and long-term economic success. “This may be the most dire moment the American transportation system has faced in decades,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told reporters at the White House this week.

“We cannot meet the needs of a growing country and a growing economy by simply maintaining our current level of effort. We must do more.”

As the mid-term elections approach, Democrats hope to use this issue to highlight Republican recalcitrance in Congress.

In New York, Obama will also announce a series of bureaucratic steps to better coordinate the federal permitting process, hoping to speed up the time it takes to get transportation approved for construction. Administration officials say that spending on transportation services has been something Republicans and Democrats have largely agreed on in the past, given the value such government projects have to the private-sector economy.

But administration officials say that unless Congress approves new spending soon, the federal Highway Trust Fund will run out of money this summer. In an assessment of the possible fallout, the administration says that the fund’s bankruptcy would delay more than 100,000 road projects, more than 5,000 transit projects, and put at risk 700,000 construction jobs.

The White House sent the Grow America Act, a broad transportation measure that includes guidelines for allowing new toll highways, to Congress this spring. A bipartisan group of senators is working on its own long-term transportation plan. Foxx warned that short-term spending measures, the divided Congress’s preferred way to fund the government in recent years, have put off the planning and financing of long-range projects essential to solving rather than just managing the nation’s growing transportation problems.

Those included bridges coming to the end of their planned use and overburdened airports, rail systems and roads. By 2050, Foxx said, the country’s transportation system will need to move 100 million new people and 14 billion additional tons of freight, nearly twice the current level.

The administration, drawing on calculations made by the American Society of Civil Engineers, estimates that $3.6 trillion in spending will be needed to sufficiently address the mounting infrastructure problems by the end of the decade.

Foxx said the Senate, controlled by Democrats, has shown support for the measure. But the Republican-controlled House poses a larger challenge and, Foxx said, the administration has much work to do there if the measure is to succeed. “I have spent a lot of time and a lot of shoe leather on both ends of Capitol Hill, and what I can tell you is, is that people on both sides of the aisle want to see something get done,” Foxx said. “

But we’re going to have to work at it, and this is going to be a nine-inning game. It’s not going to get solved in the first inning.”

As Obama visits the iconic New York bridge, Vice President Biden will travel to Cleveland to make a similar push for transportation spending. While in New York, Obama will do some fundraising for the Democratic Party in Manhattan, and on Thursday, he will mark the ceremonial opening of the national Sept. 11 memorial and museum in lower Manhattan.

Category: General Update