Highway and Transportation Funding Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Thank you very much, Madam President.

I know we have a number of colleagues who still want to speak, and we want to get to votes tonight, so I want to be very brief speaking in opposition to the Lee amendment and in support of the amendment of my friends Senator Carper, Senator Boxer, and Senator Corker.

Madam President, I want to quickly tell you about the Norwalk River Bridge, which is a bridge in the State of Connecticut, which is pretty important to the transit of people and goods throughout the Northeast because it spans the Norwalk River and allows for trains--Amtrak trains, Metro-North trains--to be able to transit millions of people over millions of trips up and down the Northeast Corridor. Without the Norwalk River Bridge, you cannot get from New Haven to New York, but you also cannot get from Washington, DC, to Boston.

That bridge is 118 years old, and it is a miracle that it opens at all. It needs to open in order to allow maritime traffic to go up and down the Norwalk River. It is a miracle that it opens at all. But, in fact, on 16 of its 271 openings last year, it did not open and it interrupted Metro-North service 175 times.

The result for not just Connecticut but the entire region is hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity. Our inability to pass a long-term transportation bill means that big projects like the replacement of the Norwalk River Bridge cannot get done. Why? Because when you only budget for 12 months or 24 months at a time--or in this instance only 6 months or 4 months at a time--there is no way for a State to be able to plan to do that kind of massive work.

So I am here on the floor to beg my colleagues to support the amendment from Senator Boxer and Senator Carper because it is time we started to get some political courage and admit that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to Federal transportation policy. Yes, it is politically difficult to make the choices necessary to come up with the funding to fill that gap.

Senator Corker and I have one particular idea, but we would love to hear others. But it is time for us to sit down and have that honest conversation because you cannot do projects like this if you do not.

But to Senator Lee's amendment, this is exactly why you need a Federal commitment to transportation funding. The idea that you are just going to devolve all of these projects down to the local level is preposterous. Why? Because this is a regional asset. The Norwalk River happens to be located in the State of Connecticut. But if all transportation funding came from the States, and Connecticut, for one reason or another, decided not to spend money on replacing the Norwalk River Bridge, it is not just Connecticut that is affected by that; transit stops in Massachusetts, in New York, in New Jersey, in Delaware, all the way down to Washington, DC.

So the reason we have made a robust commitment to Federal funding for both highways and mass transit is because the benefits accrue to all of us.

Senator Lee said that this is just an innovation in the way we fund transportation, like, as he said, the innovation in the way in which people buy books. That analogy speaks to our imperative for Federal funding because the way that books have been sold is different. It used to be that you just used the local roads to drive down and buy your book from the local bookstore. Today, you buy at amazon.com, and it is the Interstate Highway System, the interstate rail system that is used to get your book from a warehouse somewhere out in the Midwest to you after you ordered it online in Connecticut. If you want to talk about the great innovations of the last 20 to 30 years, they all buttress the idea that we live in an interconnected, interstate world in which we need a Federal commitment to highway funding--one that does not just parse out funding one month at a time.

My State is particularly dependent on this kind of funding. Connecticut only survives if we are able to unlock the congested highways and byways and rail lines that connect my State to New York and to Boston in particular. But this Nation as a whole will not succeed, will not survive economically if we do not grapple with the fact that as China spends 12 percent of its GDP on infrastructure, Europe spends 6 percent of its GDP on infrastructure, even if we just held the line, we would still only be spending 3 percent of our GDP on the most important asset to the future of America's economy.

So I hope we reject the Lee amendment. I hope we pass the Carper-Boxer-Corker amendment. I am glad to join them in support of it this evening.

I yield back.

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