As Congress starts hammering out a transportation spending bill, keep your eye on who asks for what and how the horses are traded. Transportation is a tried-and-true way for legislators to bring home the bacon, so we're sure to see legislation packed with pork barrel projects that range from the necessary to the advisable to the ridiculous.
Negotiations over the long-awaited, oft-discussed replacement for the SAFETEA-LU transportation bill passed five years ago are sure to be vicious. The bill, which many hope to see introduced before November's midterm election, comes as a seemingly unbridgeable partisan divide leaves Congress paralyzed and turns even routine bills into bitter ideological battles.
We're already seeing transportation spending being fought in ideological terms.
Everyone recognizes something is wrong, and they all know the country's infrastructure is literally falling apart. But the questions of what to fix and how to fix it are being framed in the familiar terms of urban vs. rural, individual liberties vs. collective benefit, fiscal restraint vs. profligate waste and the government's role in all of this to begin with.
Beyond the ideological fight lies the traditional horse-trading found in politics in general and transportation spending in particular. As Matthew Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity notes in an excellent examination of transportation lobbying, political support for a particular project tends to be a far higher priority than the economic benefit a particular project may bring. As a result of this need to curry political favor, rural projects tend to get an outsize return on their tax investment and the pet projects of powerful politicians tend to get precedence. More egregious examples include the "bridge to nowhere" and John Murtha Airport.
Earlier this week, the House Democratic leadership made the sudden-but-not-altogether-unexpected decision to ban earmarks to private corporations. The move, quickly followed by a Republican promise to abstain from *any *earmarks, is an attempt to regain the trust of a weary, cynical electorate that views earmarks as a vehicle for waste and corruption. The effect of the bans is yet to be determined -- not all legislators have signed on, and there are plenty of loopholes. Because earmarks are a favorite method of funding transportation projects, the bans most likely will have some effect on the upcoming transportation bill. Put in a particular rut by this development are lobbyists and donors, for whom such earmarks are a stock in trade.
At issue in this nascent bill is whether the United States should rebuild and augment its existing transportation or start anew -- and if so, what a new system should look like. On one side stand proponents of mass transit and livability, which encourage developing and raising quality of life in existing areas instead of new ones. They have found support within the White House and among some congressional leaders. On the other side are politicians, mostly from rural areas, who maintain a healthy skepticism of the progressive model of transportation. It's to be expected, because many of them represent areas where things like high-speed rail don't make much sense and there's plenty of room to build more highways.
The Surface Transportation Authorization Act, by Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minnesota) and Rep. John Mica (R-Florida), provides a strong indication of what we'll see in a transportation bill. It dedicates unprecedented amounts of money to projects like mass transit ($100 billion) and high-speed rail ($50 billion). It truly is a big step forward for American transportation policy. The White House has of late been guided by a new ideology that makes transit and livability a priority, and tends to replace or improve existing roads and related infrastructure instead of building new ones.
But the bill is enormous -- some $500 billion -- and no one has any idea how to fund it. The most likely answer is an increase in the federal gas tax -- which, by the way, has not been increased since 1993-- but that proposal has not yet been introduced. Given the current economic climate and mounting backlash against federal spending, a new tax may be both necessary and deeply unpopular. The battle is coming, but the lines not yet drawn. Sen. George Voinovich, a prominent Republican from Ohio, wants a new transportation bill and he wants it funded. The Obama Administration, on the other hand, would prefer to table this issue until next year and opposes increasing the gas tax -- but hasn't suggested an alternative.
Whatever happens, we're in for a long fight. It took two years for SAFETEA-LU to move from congressional committee to President Bush's desk, and that was before Congress developed the aura of an Internet chat room. The good news is nobody seems interested in a long, drawn-out fight. The bad news is by adding ideology to the process and subtracting earmarks, solutions to our transportation problems are more likely to be found not through compromise but by partisan appeals.
This fight over a transportation bill probably will be very short, but very nasty.
Photo: Tuaussi / Flickr
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