Hire More Heroes Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. DeSAULNIER. Madam Chair, this commonsense amendment directs the U.S. Department of Transportation to study ways to improve data collection on highway safety hardware devices. Today, these devices, which include guardrails, barriers, terminals, and railings, are critical to the safety of our roadways yet are often taken for granted.

In November of last year, Darryl Blackmon, a 24-year-old San Francisco Bay Area resident, a beloved family member who supported his mom, amongst other family members, community volunteer, and football star at Kansas State University, was killed in a collision with a guardrail that 40 States and the District of Columbia have stopped installing due to safety concerns.

In response to tragedies like Darryl Blackmon's death and thanks to a whistleblower who highlighted the fraudulent actions taken by this particular guardrail manufacturer, earlier this year, a Federal judge handed down a $663 million judgment against the manufacturer for failing to disclose information to Federal and State regulators about modifications made to their guardrail specifications after they were approved by the Federal Highway Administration.

Despite Federal tests dating back to 2005, suggesting these guardrails are safe, just last month, Virginia's attorney general said that the guardrails tested by the Virginia Department of Transportation ``failed miserably.'' According to media reports, more than 200,000 of these particular guardrails may still be in service on our Nation's highways. Unfortunately, there is no existing mechanism to accurately verify this number or locate all the guardrails. That is why this amendment is critically important. Without a practical mechanism for identifying defective guardrails, many States are still assessing their ability to remove defective products from our roadways and incurring additional liability.

Unfortunately, these events have highlighted the need to reform our current system of identifying and inventorying our highway hardware. This amendment makes progress towards reassessing FHWA's hardware review process to enhance accountability, promote transparency, and improve responsiveness to future safety concerns.

It is critical to the safety of the traveling public that products installed on our roadways and using Federal dollars are properly evaluated and accounted for when safety concerns arise. Madam Chair, I urge my colleagues to support this commonsense amendment.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. DeSAULNIER. Mr. Chairman, this bipartisan amendment establishes an independent peer review group to assess the quality assurance, cost containment, and risk management and, in addition, creates a stricter cost management plan for Federal transportation projects that cost over $2.5 billion. So it is only Federal projects over $2.5 billion. It doesn't apply to anything below $2.5 billion.

As we all know, large infrastructure projects are vital to our country's development and its economic growth. Unfortunately, 9 out of every 10 megaprojects experience cost overruns and suffer significant delays. This is according to an extensive research project out of Cambridge University in England. Current law already requires financial reporting for projects costing more than $500 million, but no additional oversight, such as what we have in this bill, exists for the largest and most complex megaprojects.

Projects like the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the I-265 bridge between Kentucky and Indiana, the Big Dig in Boston, the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York, and Denver International Airport--all of these projects would have benefited greatly from a comprehensive risk management plan and an independent peer review group, according to the experts.

Mr. Chairman, the public deserves a system that manages costs, foresees risks, and holds decisionmakers accountable. In my prior life as a member of the California State Legislature and the State senate, we had a bipartisan investigation and public hearings as to what went wrong and what lessons could be learned from our overruns on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge replacement that was replaced, a project that was $5 billion overbudget and 10 years late.

The project started, unfortunately, in 1989 because of the Loma Prieta earthquake. The idea in this bipartisan review was just to learn what we could from our experience and not to cast any judgments. Amongst the most significant things we were told were the implementation of a rigorous, with the least conflict of interest possible, peer review group and a more rigorous cost assessment and cost review process.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment establishes that independent peer review group consisting of at least five individuals, without conflicts of interest, tasked with giving expert advice on scientific, technical, and management aspects of the megaproject. The amendment saves taxpayer dollars and reduces project timelines by requiring a comprehensive risk management plan that includes a description of identified risks associated with the project, proposed mechanisms to manage such risks, and updated cost estimates, among others.

I urge my colleagues to support this commonsense bipartisan amendment.

Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa).

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