Senate Bill DOA

Continue spending money at current levels that are far greater than revenues. Drain the Highway Trust Fund. Make a few token changes in the law to make it look like you are doing something. Then revisit all the issues in just two years because you are too chicken to make the hard decisions today.

That’s pretty much the outline of a transportation reauthorization presented by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee late last week. Really, this plan is just like the one the committee presented last May, except the new one would expire in just two years instead of the usual six.

Ironically titled, “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century” or MAP-21–since it only moves ahead two years and makes no progress on the debates over funding sources and spending restraints–the plan exists only as a three-page outline, not the thousands of pages that would make up an actual bill.


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The good news is this plan “lacks political momentum,” as transportation writer Ken Orski puts it. The bad news is that the six-year House bill, which is fiscally realistic and has at least some momentum, probably does not have enough to pass both the Senate and the House.

The Senate committee held a hearing last week at which representatives of various interest groups fawned all over the senators for being willing to give them so much money that doesn’t really exist. The most realistic view was taken by Greg Cohen, of the American Highway Users Alliance, who basically said, “Pass your bill; let the House pass its bill; and we’ll meet you in conference committee.”

The two-year Senate bill that keeps spending at current levels and the six-your House bill that reduces spending to no more than revenues are so fundamentally different that it is hard to imagine they could be reconciled in a conference committee. But stranger things have happened in Congress.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

4 Responses to Senate Bill DOA

  1. metrosucks says:

    Let’s reconcile it. Throw out pork funding, like 750 million for light rail to nowhere in Milwaukie or stupid rail across the Columbia River, for one. Cut out a whole bunch of these useless planned light rail lines and you’re really getting somewhere with savings.

    But what’s the realistic chance of that, right?

  2. bennett says:

    “Then revisit all the issues in just two years because you are too chicken to make the hard decisions today.”

    That’s congress for ya! Though I think it’s more than just a case of being “too chicken.” Other than the whoever is president at the given time, everybody likes short term deals because it allows them to endlessly continue the attack on their opponents.

  3. MJ says:

    MAP-21. The names (euphemisms) just get more absurd and detached from reality each time.

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