Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I rise today to speak in support of the Transportation reauthorization bill that is currently before the Senate. It is called the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, so we call it by its acronym, MAP 21. It is a critical piece of legislation that will put Americans back to work and lay the foundation for future economic growth.
Our transportation infrastructure has long been at the heart of America's success, from the transcontinental railroad to the interstate highway. Yet, across the country, the infrastructure that helped build our great economy has been allowed to fall into disrepair.
For evidence of our Nation's crumbling infrastructure, one need look no further than my home State of Rhode Island. Anyone who drives to work or school in our State sees the problems--bridges that are subject to weight restrictions, highways with lane closures, and roads everywhere marked with potholes. Only one-third of our highway miles are rated in fair or good condition; the majority are poor or mediocre. According to a recent report, one in five bridges in Rhode Island is structurally deficient--the fourth highest figure for any State. You look nationwide, and the picture does not improve.
The American Society of Civil Engineers rates our national transportation systems as near failing. They give our roads and highways a D-minus, our bridges a C, our freight and passenger rail a C-minus, and our transit systems a D. This is not the kind of report card you want to post at home on your refrigerator, and it is not one our great Nation should tolerate.
Instead of committing ourselves to solving our infrastructure deficit, however, we continue to fall short. The civil engineers estimate that we would need to dedicate $250 billion each year to bring our transportation systems into a state of good repair. At current levels, the United States spends only 2.4 percent of GDP on infrastructure, compared with European nations at 5 percent and China and India at about 9 percent.
Let's recall why it is so important that we invest in transportation. Our economy relies on the ability to get goods and services to where they are needed. An entrepreneur cannot start a business if his employees cannot get to work. A manufacturer cannot stay in business if its products cannot reach its customers. A free market can only operate if supply can actually get to demand. Our roads, trains, and buses are what allow this to happen.
If we don't make the necessary investment, our global competitors nevertheless will. MAP 21 represents a downpayment that will fund important highway, transit, and rail projects to repair our aging transportation infrastructure and help ensure that America can succeed, as it has since we first broke ground on the Interstate Highway System.
As important as this bill is to our long-term prosperity and our global economic position, MAP 21 also provides immediate support to local construction projects and the quality jobs that go along with them.
It is estimated that MAP 21 will protect 1.8 million existing jobs around the country, with the potential to create up to a million more new jobs. This is particularly important given the high level of unemployment in the construction industry. In my home State of Rhode Island, this bill would support an estimated 8,100 jobs. At a time when our State's unemployment rate hovers stubbornly around 10 percent, those jobs are absolutely crucial.
Given the decrepit state of our transportation systems, it should be obvious that we will have to address our infrastructure needs at some point. We need to do this work sooner or later, and there is no better time to make that investment than now, with so many workers ready to get to work and so many projects ready to get underway. I know that in Rhode Island there is no shortage of workers or worthwhile transportation projects. In fact, Secretary of Transportation LaHood was in Providence today, and I invited him to tour one of the most significant of Rhode Island's transportation projects, and that is the Providence viaduct. That viaduct is an overland highway bridge that carries Interstate 95 for nearly a quarter mile through downtown Providence, our capital city. It is one of the busiest stretches of the entire I 95 corridor.
The viaduct runs north and south over U.S. Route 6 and State Route 10, the Amtrak northeast corridor, commuter, and freight rail lines, and over the Woonasquatucket River. It provides access to downtown Providence, four universities, Rhode Island Hospital, our convention center and arena, and the Providence Place Mall, not to mention the north-south traffic along the eastern seaboard that traffics through this area.
What Secretary LaHood saw on his tour today is a bridge that is quite literally crumbling. The viaduct was built in 1964, and it is showing its age. Its deck is badly deteriorated, steel girders are cracked and don't meet minimum specifications for brittleness, and our State department of transportation has installed these wooden planks under the I-beams to keep concrete from falling through onto the cars, pedestrians, and even the trains that travel underneath the highway. You can also see here where a section of the concrete has fallen through the supports, exposing the steel reinforcement, which is now rusting out in the open.
While the viaduct remains safe for travel today, it is a weak link in the critical I 95 corridor. It is a potential safety hazard for the 160,000 vehicles that travel on it each and every day, as well as to the cars and trains that pass underneath. The bridge is inspected on a regular basis, just as a precaution. If the viaduct were to fail or simply require posted weight limits, it would cause substantial regional disruptions to traffic and commerce and trade.
Clearly, this is a problem that needs to be addressed. The cost of repairing the Providence viaduct is estimated at roughly $140 million. This is a reasonable investment to help ensure the flow of commerce through the entire Northeast, but it represents a very significant financial burden for a small State such as Rhode Island. Fixing the viaduct would take out almost two-thirds of the money that Rhode Island would get from this bill. Rhode Island simply isn't big enough and doesn't have the resources to tackle this important project and still meet our other transportation obligations.
I have filed an amendment to MAP 21 to fund the program for the Projects of National and Regional Significance Program. The Projects of National and Regional Significance Program is a competitive grant program that is designed to support critical, high-cost transportation projects that are difficult to complete with existing funding sources. This program can help us address those big infrastructure projects around the country--ones such as the viaduct--that are currently being kicked down the road because the State DOTs cannot scrape enough money together to get them underway.
The Projects of National and Regional Significance Program is authorized in MAP 21. We got that done in the Environment and Public Works Committee. Now we need to get that authorized program funded. I am pleased to have the support of my senior Senator, Jack Reed, and Senator Merkley on this amendment. I look forward to working with them and other Senators so that we can start the important work of rebuilding critical infrastructure projects, such as the viaduct, that are so important to our economy.
While I am thanking other Senators, let me recognize Senator Olympia Snowe for her work on another amendment that would grant States limited flexibility to use congestion mitigation and air quality funds toward their transit systems. This is an important issue for Rhode Island, as we begin to scale up our new South County commuter rail.
I introduced a version of this amendment in committee and continue to believe that increased flexibility in the Congested Mitigation and Air Quality Program, or CMAQ, would promote State-level transit options that we so critically need.
Let me thank our chairwoman, Senator Boxer, and her ranking member, Senator Inhofe, for their consideration of our amendment and, more important, for their hard work on this bill overall. As a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, I can testify that the leadership of
Chairman Boxer and Ranking Member Inhofe, working together, is what has made the difference for this transportation reauthorization. Through their efforts, we were able to unanimously vote the bill out of committee, making the important statement that investment in our Nation's infrastructure has strong, bipartisan support. They have set an example that I hope ultimately will be followed by the handful of Senators who are obstructing progress on this transportation bill, and our colleagues on the other side of this building. The American people deserve better than efforts to gut transportation jobs and slash infrastructure programs, or to slow down progress on this bill with irrelevant amendments.
With our economy struggling to get back on its feet, with our roads and bridges in desperate need of repair, now is not the time to be debating unpopular and misguided efforts to roll back protections for women's health. Now is not the time, and this is not the bill, to debate whether we should undermine rules that protect our environment or fast track a pipeline project that is clearly not ready for prime time. We have a bipartisan bill before us. We have a bill that will create jobs. We have a bill that will get our economy moving forward. That should be our priority. We should get to the business of legislating on this bill.
This is a country that does big things. We built highways and rail systems connecting Americans from coast to coast. We built skyscrapers and airplanes and rockets to take us to the Moon and back. Big things are part of America's national identity. Just as important, they are a vital source of jobs during this trying economic time.
Let's keep doing big things. Let's give the people in Rhode Island and across the country a transportation infrastructure they can be proud of, and let's not cut funding and retreat. We cannot afford to go backward. The infrastructure is what supports our economy. We need to refocus on the job of getting America moving ahead, and MAP 21 is a step forward.
I thank the Chair and yield the floor.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. It doesn't make sense. I thank her for getting us to this point. I know how much frustration she must feel, having worked so hard and in such a bipartisan way to get us to this point and to now have a process that would get this bill moving forward and get funding out there, get infrastructure repaired, put men and women to work in good, solid, high-paying jobs, only to be all snarled up so that a small group of people can score points with a political issue that has nothing to do with transportation, infrastructure, or highways.
If people want to have a fight about whether women should get access to contraceptive medicine, I suppose that is their right in the Senate. But the idea to stop a highway bill to forge that fight is what to me is irresponsible.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. It doesn't make sense. I thank her for getting us to this point. I know how much frustration she must feel, having worked so hard and in such a bipartisan way to get us to this point and to now have a process that would get this bill moving forward and get funding out there, get infrastructure repaired, put men and women to work in good, solid, high-paying jobs, only to be all snarled up so that a small group of people can score points with a political issue that has nothing to do with transportation, infrastructure, or highways.
If people want to have a fight about whether women should get access to contraceptive medicine, I suppose that is their right in the Senate. But the idea to stop a highway bill to forge that fight is what to me is irresponsible.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Yes.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank my chairman, and yes, it is kind of astonishing, the breadth and the scope of this amendment. As if CEOs don't have enough power over their workforce, as if they haven't done enough to send jobs from American factories offshore to factories overseas, now they would be able to dictate what kind of health care their employees can receive, and not based on marketplace considerations, not based even on health considerations, but based on their own unchecked moral or religious beliefs.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I think it is a terrible mistake to go down that road, but I think it is a double mistake: it is wrong to go down that road in the first instance, but it is also wrong while we need jobs so urgently, while our highways crumble and our bridges deteriorate and water works continue to fail and we have the ability to put people to work in America at good jobs. You can't offshore a job building an American highway; you have to do it right here in this country. These are important jobs and this is important work. We should be getting about this.
I think it sends a terrible signal to the American people when the Senate, taking up this piece of legislation, has to be led off into all these other battles that have nothing to do with highways, that have nothing to do with infrastructure, that have nothing to do with jobs, but are simply an exercise in political gamesmanship.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. It is unfortunate, when there are real stakes for real families on the table and real time slipping by, that we don't get this done. We get jacked up enough around here, but as hard as the chairman has worked to bring this to the floor and to be ready, here we are, stopped again, dealing with irrelevant issues again, and all for the entertainment and distraction of people. It is not about jobs, it is not about the economy, it is not about our infrastructure, it is not about laying the foundation for future prosperity, and so it is frustrating that we have to go through this exercise.
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