Search Results for: reauthorization

Are Earmarks Dead?

By | | News commentary
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Congressional leaders have promised a two-year moratorium on earmarks. Some in Congress are even trying to get the money back for orphaned earmarks, i.e., earmarks that have not yet been spent. There are usually lots of orphaned transportation projects because the states are not really interested in doing earmarks that override their own priorities.

It remains to be seen how serious Congress is about this. The hexennial surface transportation reauthorization should take place in the next two years, and it is hard to believe Congress will resist putting earmarks into it. While no earmarks were included in transportation reauthorization bills before 1982, the number grew rapidly after then, reaching more than 7,000 in the 2005 bill.

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Will Congress simply agree to whatever the FTA says are the best projects? Or will it override the FTA recommendations? We’ll know in a few months how serious Congress is about the no-earmarks rule.

House Transportation Subcommittee Chairs

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Yesterday, Representative John Mica, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, announced the names of the chairs and members of the committee’s various subcommittees. The good news for those who believe in user-fee driven transportation is that the chair of the Highways and Transit Subcommittee is John “Jimmy” Duncan, Jr., who is probably one of the four or five most fiscally conservative members of the House. The good news for those who believe in high-speed rail subsidies is that the chair of the Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee, which oversees Amtrak, is Bill Shuster, who has a history of sending pork to his district in Pennsylvania.

Not your George Bush conservative: Rep. Duncan questioning the high cost of the war in Afghanistan.

Representing Knoxville, TN, Duncan is a hardcore paleoconservative. For those not familiar with the nuances in the conservative community, paleos are almost the polar opposites of neoconservatives. Paleos hated George W. Bush with a passion. Duncan himself voted against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as every stimulus bill. He thinks global warming is a scam, so he probably won’t be persuaded by many environmental arguments. Like almost all members of Congress, Duncan has taken advantage of earmarks, but he supports legislation to ban them and wants to cut federal spending.

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Passing the Test

By | | Transportation
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This week, the new Republican-dominated House passed one of the first tests of its ability to promote fiscal sanity in the face of interest-group lobbying. On Tuesday, the House voted in new rules that govern its own operations, and one of those rules struck at the heart of recent transportation pork barreling.

Even though federal highway funding comes out of gas taxes, Congress must take two steps before the money can be spent. First, a bill must authorize the spending. Then a second bill must actually appropriate the money–and appropriations normally can be, and often are, less than authorized.

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FAA Bill Postponed for 17th Time

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, the House decisively postponed reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration, something it has already done 16 times since reauthorization was scheduled to take place in 2007. At stake is the future of America’s airline network, which is beholden to the federal government to maintain and update an antiquated air traffic control system.

Flickr photo by Andrew Morrell Photography.

Air traffic control is fully funded by airline ticket fees and other aircraft users. But the system is run by the federal government, which for more than 20 years has promised to update it with a Next Generation system. In contrast, Canada’sprivatized air traffic control recently won an award from the International Air Transport Association for being the world’s best system. ATC agencies in Iceland and the Netherlands also won awards; these have been “corporatized,” turned into independent, government-owned entities that are not dependent on their governments for funding or reauthorizations.

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Are Earmarks Necessary?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Represenative Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, is against earmarks. But not when it comes to transportation. “Advocating for transportation projects for ones district in my mind does not equate to an earmark.”

Georgia Republican Representative Jack Kingston agrees. “How do you handle [transportation] without earmarks, since that’s a heavily earmarked bill?” he says.

I don’t think these people got the message last month. Here are a few pertinent points about transportation earmarks.

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Interpreting the Election Results

By | | News commentary, Regional planning, Transportation
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Tea party supporters do not agree on a lot of issues, but are firm on two things: cutting government spending and protecting property rights. What do the election results mean for the future of land-use and transportation planning?

On one hand, many of the results look promising for supporters of property rights and efficient (user-fee-driven) transportation policies.

  • Wisconsin rail skeptic Scott Walker, who promised to cancel the state’s moderate-speed rail project, soundly trounced the pro-rail incumbent governor.
  • Ohio elected fiscal conservative John Kasich, who is also a rail skeptic, as governor, probably dooming that state’s moderate-speed rail plans.
  • Florida appears to have elected fiscal conservative Rick Scott as governor. He will probably take a hard look at that state’s high-speed rail programs.
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Notes from Orlando

By | | Mission
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PowerPoint shows from the 2010 Preserving the American Dream conference are posted on the American Dream Coalition web site. Here are a few interesting comments made at the conference.

“The U.S. Department of Transportation was created on April Fools Day, 1967. Today, it produces a product (mobility) that it doesn’t understand and doesn’t care much about it.” — Alan Pisarski

“Why don’t people live closer to work? Less than 20 percent of travel is work-related, and 30 percent of households do not have any commuters. So people don’t base where they live on where they work.” — Steve Polzin

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“Historically, higher-density housing housed lower income families. Now we are building high-density housing for high-income households. But we can’t assume that the travel habits of of people who lived in historic higher densities will apply to new higher densities.” — Steve Polzin

Urban Planners’ Employment Act

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd has introduced a “Livable Communities Act” that promises more than $4 billion in federal grants to communities that promote smart-growth principles. The Senate held hearings on the bill last week, and a somewhat similar bill has been introduced in the House by Representative Albio Sires of New Jersey.

The Senate bill starts out with “findings” that repeat all the usual smart-growth crap that is mostly false and all highly debatable. Some of the findings imply that there is a growing demand for high-density, mixed-use housing. But if that is true, why does the federal government need to subsidize it?

The bill laments that “as much as 30 percent of current demand for housing is for housing in dense, walkable, mixed-use communities,” while “less than 2 percent of new housing is in this category.” Of course, that may be because many cities have a surplus of existing housing that fits this description, so they don’t need any new construction. (It may also be that “as much as 30 percent” is really more like “less than 20 percent.)

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Amtrak Has “Revolutionary” Idea

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Amtrak vice-president James McHugh recently presented a revolutionary idea to members of Congress: give Amtrak a hell of a lot more money. Okay, maybe that’s not so revolutionary, since it is the same idea of just about every agency in Washington DC.

Amtrak, according to the testimony, needs “long-term, sustainable funding.” Well, who doesn’t? Where will Amtrak’s funding come from? McHugh has no clue, except that he suggests that Amtrak be included in the transportation reauthorization bill that Congress will take up next year. Until 1982, all the money in this bill (which Congress revises about every six years) went to highways. Since then, it has mostly gone to highways and transit — none to Amtrak.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner is flying to DC today to give presentations in four cities over the next six days. First, on Friday, I’ll join Ron Utt of the Heritage Foundation in a briefing on rail transit and transportation reauthorization in Rayburn House Office Building room B-339. Lunch will be provided.

On Monday from 9 to 11, the Antiplanner will join several other speakers on transportation issues at the Holiday Inn in Concord, New Hampshire. This event is sponsored by the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy.

On Tuesday at 4:30 the Antiplanner will speak about Gridlock at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. This event is sponsored by the Yankee Institute for Public Policy.
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On Wednesday at 6 pm, the Antiplanner will join James Howard Kunstler to discuss the question, “Who should control urban growth?” This presumably lively program will take place in room 001 of the Solomon Center at Brown University.

If you are in Washington, DC or New England, I hope to see you at one of these events.