Highway and Transportation Funding Act of 2015, Part II

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend, the ranking member, for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, the majority has turned virtually its only congressional policy, tax savings, on its head with useless short-term transportation bills and extensions. Their short-term policy on the Nation's highways, bridges, and transit has simply transferred the transportation tax burden to the State taxes of their constituents.

Twenty-one States and the District of Columbia have raised their gas user fees--six since July 1--Iowa, Wyoming, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, District of Columbia, South Dakota, Idaho, Georgia, Nebraska, and Vermont.

States going in that direction are Michigan, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington State.

States also considering user fee increases are Kentucky, Missouri, New Jersey, and South Carolina. That makes almost half the States that Congress has driven to State taxpayers alone, States that have nothing in common except the desire to keep their transportation infrastructure, the key to a growth economy, from completely disintegrating.

Meanwhile, the Representatives in Washington have continually failed to pay their part, on the average, about 50 percent of the costs of State infrastructure with Federal dollars, yet the Federal dollars are only a pass-through that goes right back to the States.

For 22 years, we have allowed the Federal user fee to remain fixed at 1993 levels, although fuel efficiency long ago made that obsolete.

Although American taxpayers have stepped up, they can't do their projects without a Federal long-term bill. In the Nation's capital, for example, the iconic Memorial Bridge, gateway to Arlington Cemetery in the south and, on the north, to the National Mall, is partially closed, leaving thousands of workers unable to take Metro buses to get to work.

Even bridges like the H Street bridge here, which needs only repair, is standing in the way of billions of dollars of nontransportation development here and nationwide.

So whatever the Congress does in the next authorization bill, two things must be done: We must put in pilots that instruct us, guide us, for a new way to fund transportation infrastructure in light of fuel efficiencies, such as cars like my hybrid Ford C-Max.

And, most of all, to be useful at all, we must have a 6-year transportation bill.

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