Vice President Joe Biden will visit Cleveland Wednesday to promote expansion of a transit program that House Republicans would rather cut. The program is helping to pay for an RTA project near University Circle.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – When Vice President Joe Biden visits a Cleveland rapid transit station on Mayfield Rd. Wednesday, he’ll promote a form of federal spending that in its broadest outlines has few opponents.
Roads need paving. Bridges need fixing. Nearly everyone agrees.
But exactly what else counts as necessary for federal transportation spending, including a Red Line rapid station in Cleveland, is another matter.
If House of Representatives Republicans prevail, there could be much less money in the future for projects like the new Little Italy-University Circle Rapid Station, which is scheduled to open in 2015 and Biden will highlight Wednesday.
Biden’s Cleveland visit is part of a broader, week-long lobbying effort by the White House to draw attention to a desire to keep spending on improving infrastructure. The overarching issue – keeping the nation’s roads and bridges open and safe – has wide consensus.
Even the biggest pro-business lobbying groups in Washington, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, are spending the week much like Biden and his boss, President Barack Obama. They’re holding forums and other events to tell Congress that it’s time for a major new transportation bill.
The current bill expires Sept. 30, and the Highway Trust Fund, which provides the money, could run short a month earlier.
Obama is going to the construction site of the new structure that will replace the Tappan Zee Bridge, spanning New York’s Hudson River, the same day as Biden’s visit to the new Little Italy-University Circle Rapid Station.
But first, Biden today will go to St. Louis and highlight a pedestrian bridge being built over a highway that separates residents and tourists from the Gateway Arch. And on Friday, the White House says, Obama will meet with workers to discuss infrastructure around Washington, D.C.
The White House says that 65 percent of the nation’s major roads are rated as being in “less than good” condition and one in four bridges require significant repairs or cannot handle today’s traffic.
But agreement on need is not the same as agreement on where to get the money, or on how to spend it.
Most current federal transportation projects, including money that gets funneled to state highway departments, are funded through a tax on gasoline (18.4 cents per gallon) and diesel fuel (24.4 cents per gallon). Those taxes have not been raised since 1993, although from 1993 to 1997, 4.3 cents of the gasoline tax was used for deficit reduction before being redirected to transportation projects.
The static tax is just part of the problem. Cars also get better gasoline mileage since the last hike, and with inflation, the money doesn’t buy as much steel and asphalt.
So Obama would replace the expiring transit bill, called Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, or MAP-21, with a $302 billion, four-year bill. Obama’s bill would supplement the gas tax with money from closing certain corporate tax provisions, including one that the White House and Democrats say has led to companies sheltering income overseas.
Republicans such as House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster have their own ideas — both for annual transportation appropriations, which last a year at a time, and for a longer-term road-and-bridge improvement program.
“While Chairman Shuster respects that the Administration has put forward its own detailed proposal, the first time it has done so, he will not agree with it on all the details,” said Justin Harclerode, Shuster’s spokesman. “Thus far, the chairman has not elaborated on any potential differences or areas of agreement as the Transportation Committee continues to develop its surface transportation proposal.”
The last big highway bill, MAP-21, authorized $105 billion over two years, marking the first agreement on a large highway bill since 2005. A series of Band-Aid approaches, as the White House had put it, sufficed in the interim.
Many supporters, including Ohio Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, say that spending on roads helps the American economy, not only by providing road-building jobs but also by keeping the economy moving.
“Road and bridge projects don’t just mean safer and less congested roads and construction jobs – they also help attract new employers and economic development,” Brown said in an email this week.
Brown said that more than 8 percent of Ohio’s bridges require major repairs or replacement. He also noted the better known projects awaiting funding, such as Route 8 in Akron and the Brent Spence Bridge in Cincinnati.
Federal highway spending, however, has become a boondoggle in the eyes of some fiscal conservatives. This is where ideological groups split with those who have interests to protect.
Emily Goff, a transportation and infrastructure policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, noted that MAP-21 funds go not only to build roads and bridges but also to build recreation trails and bicycle paths. These are important to groups pushing for transportation alternatives, but they siphon money that could go for even more roads and bridges to ease considerable traffic congestion, Goff says.
Yet MAP-21 requires states to set aside money for these kinds of alternatives, Goff says, to the tune of $27.5 million this year in Pennsylvania and $78.9 million in Texas.
“Identifying a connection between these activities and a federal highway program concerned with interstate highway system construction and maintenance proves difficult,” Goff wrote in a recent Heritage blog post. “Indeed, there is nothing federal or highway about bicycle paths, landscaping, or any of these local activities.”
The RTA station in Cleveland is a project that could raise a similar question, with its emphasis on meshing light rail with development around University Circle and Little Italy. The existing station, on Euclid Avenue at E. 120th Street, is considered functionally obsolete, so the new station will be placed several blocks south, at Mayfield Road at E. 119th Street.
About $8.9 in funding comes from highly competitive U.S. Department of Transportation grants, according to the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority.
The grant money did not come MAP-21. Rather, it came from a program created under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or the recession-era stimulus act. The transportation component of the stimulus act, called Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER), gets money appropriated annually from Congress — $3.5 billion so far for 270 projects nationwide, including $600 million this year, the White House says.
The TIGER program will end soon, too — unless Obama and Biden get their way.
In that case, TIGER would become permanent, greatly expanded to $5 billion over four years. The Obama White House wants to fold it into the next iteration of a four-year road-and-bridge bill.
House Republicans are unlikely to go along. The House appropriations subcommittee for transportation on May 6 recommended a lower sum of $100 million for TIGER in 2015, and the GOP-led panel would further restrict TIGER grants to “projects that will address critical transportation needs, such as road, highway and bridge construction and improvement.”
In other words, while money for the Little Italy-University Circle RTA station appears secure, future projects like it could go unfunded.
That is apparently why Biden is coming to Cleveland: to highlight what the money has helped build and point out what would have happened were it not there.
The White House would not comment on this in advance of the vice president’s trip. In an email, White House spokesman Keith Maley said, “Members of both parties have put forward their own ideas on the Hill, and the most important thing is that we pass a long-term bill that creates jobs and provides certainty for cities, states, and businesses. It’s time to get the job done.”
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