Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. GOSAR. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer an amendment intended to prevent yet another costly overreach by the Federal Government into the jurisdiction of local towns and communities.

Last Congress, during debate on this bill, the House passed an amendment of mine to prevent funds for HUD's proposed new regulation that will allow bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., to get in the middle of local planning and zoning and prohibit community development block grant funds from going to communities that need them.

The amendment seeks to once again defund and block this new regulation that was not approved by Congress. HUD's misguided rule would grant the Department authority to dictate local zoning requirements in any community across the country that applies for a community development block grant.

According to reports, in 2012, this rule would have negatively impacted more than 1,200 municipalities throughout the country, causing these communities to forfeit millions that are meant to help the neediest of families.

Once again, this flawed proposal by HUD will increase local taxes, depress property values, and cause further harm to impoverished communities that are actually in need of these funds.

These burdensome zoning rules that would be imposed by HUD bureaucrats on localities would be derived from tracked resident data based on citizens' race, sex, religion, and other federally protected demographics.

Multiple watchdog groups have raised serious and valid concerns about HUD's proposal. A trial run of this rule already took place in New York. It failed miserably, and a local county was initially forced to forego $12 million in funds that would have benefited the community due to the impractical and unrealistic requirements associated with the misguided agency regulation.

The county had intended to use a large portion of these block grant funds to establish public housing for individuals in need. But recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of the county and granted a stay against HUD's attempts to reallocate those millions.

This new regulation that is sitting at OMB is very dangerous and, worst of all, unnecessary. The Federal Government already has the authority to withhold grant money from communities that violate the law. And to clarify, I do mean the actual law in the United States Code, as opposed to overreaching executive dictums.

American citizens and communities should be free to choose where they would like to live and not be subject to Federal neighborhood microengineering at the behest of overreaching Federal bureaucrats.

Further, HUD officials shouldn't be holding hostage grant moneys aimed at community improvement based on its unrealistic utopian ideas of what every community should resemble. Local zoning decisions have traditionally been, and should always be, made by local communities, not bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.

I ask my colleagues to support this commonsense amendment because it keeps the Federal Government out of your backyard and prevents the Feds from reorganizing communities to a fantastical standard.

I ask my colleagues to support this amendment because it aims to treat municipalities and individual citizens as capable and intelligent, rather than disenfranchised, divided, and coddled groups in need of protection from a problem that does not exist.

As always, I thank the chairman and ranking member for their continued work on the committee.

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Mr. GOSAR. Mr. Chairman, how dare the opposition create and instigate racism. This is about decisions made at the local level and the local level knowing what is best for their communities. There is nothing of the sort that the gentleman from Minnesota brought up in regard to that attitude that I brought forward.

This is an overreach of the Federal Government instilling in our local communities where, how, and when people are going to live. That is the wrong way to be. Instead of building cripples like we are doing right now with the Federal Government, we ought to make sustainable communities that are based on local ideas and principles.

I ask all Members to vote for this amendment because it definitely rejects the overreach of the Federal Government.

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Mr. GOSAR. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer an amendment which would prohibit funds for the implementation of the Department of Transportation's bungled new regulations for rail tank car standards.

I am strongly in favor of robust standards and best practices which actually improve the safety and efficiency of oil-by-rail transport. However, the new tank car rule completely missed the mark.

Instead of utilizing the expertise and practical experience of the rail, oil, and manufacturing industries, the Obama administration developed a series of special interest regulations at the behest of extremist environmental groups that seem more intent on thwarting the American energy renaissance than on actually creating a safer rail network.

In fact, the only reason these new regulations were even proposed is because of a misguided lawsuit filed against the DOT by the Sierra Club.

Analytics firm ICF International estimated the cost of these new regulations to top $42 billion, which will be laid on the backs of individual consumers and hard-working Americans. I repeat, $42 billion will be lost to our economy as a result of this new rule. These costly regulations will be reflected not only in the price we pay at the pump, but also in the price of manufacturing the millions of products that use plastics and chemicals derived from American petroleum.

The most egregious part is that these regulations don't even address the root cause of these accidents, which are related to track conditions and human error.

This new rule is nothing more than regulation in search of a problem. Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said as much in 2014 when he admitted: ``The truth is that 99.9 percent of these oil shipments reach their destinations safely.''

These new and overreaching mandates require railroad companies to unnecessarily increase their steel tank walls and will require significant upgrades and retrofitting for an estimated 154,500 tank cars. In fact, The Wall Street Journal has reported: ``The steel jacket alone would lower a car's 30,000-gallon capacity by about 800 gallons, forcing shippers to deploy more cars, according to rail industry analysts.''

Clearly, this is an unintended consequence of these new regulations for a .01 percent problem, which actually increases this .01 percent user accident rate percentage by requiring significantly more railcars to actually haul the amount of oil.

In addition, the aggressive timeline proposed by the DOT for completing these retrofits is unrealistic and could harm consumers by disrupting the production and transportation of goods that play major roles in our economy, including chemicals, gasoline, crude oil, and ethanol.

If Democrats and this administration were really concerned about rail safety for transporting oil, they would approve the Keystone pipeline. Pipelines are the safest way to transfer crude.

Our country is in the midst of an energy renaissance which is driving a much-needed economic revival in American manufacturing. We should be pursuing thoughtful, fact-based best practices, instead of adding artificial constraints on the growth of the American energy sector focused on a 1 percent problem that is caused by user error.

I encourage my colleagues to support my amendment which would prohibit the implementation of this extraneous new rule and to insist that the Department of Transportation pursue a more feasible, data-driven approach that has safety standards in mind.

I thank the chair and ranking member for their leadership on this bill.

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Mr. GOSAR. Mr. Chairman, I want to make sure everybody understands that user error and train track applications are the ones that have actually caused these problems.

When you actually look at a solution to a fact-based application, we ought to be spending more time on engineering errors and track conditions than we are over something that is misguided, like these tank car metals.

I urge all of my colleagues to vote in favor of the Gosar amendment.

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Mr. GOSAR. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer a commonsense, fiscally responsible amendment that will ensure scarce transportation dollars are going towards highways, bridges, and other critical infrastructure that are in desperate need of repair.

The Obama administration's budget request for the fiscal year 2016 included $500 million for a new discretionary grant program for bus transit. The administration made the same new request in fiscal year 2015 for this same misguided program. This request was rejected in its entirety last year, and the proposed rapid growth area transit program received no funding in the CR/Omnibus. With significant infrastructure needs, including road and bridge maintenance, now is not the time to spend $500 million on a new discretionary bus transit program.

In fact, the Obama administration actually proposed two new programs this year that sought funding from the highway trust fund, both of which asked for $500 million for each. The committee made clear in the committee report that they chose to fund the new $500 million Fixing and Accelerating Surface Transportation, or FAST, program in this bill. If I had to fund only one of these two new programs, that is exactly the one I would have funded.

So I applaud the chairman, ranking member, and committee for the choice they made, and also for apparently choosing not to fund the proposed rapid growth area transit program once again in this legislation.

Having said that, there are no detailed summaries of the particular program accounts because authorizing language has not yet been passed. In addition, nothing is said about the proposed $500 million new discretionary bus transit program in the bill or the committee report. My amendment is also necessary to prevent funds from being transferred to this account.

A recent economic analysis found: ``Over the past few decades lawmakers have diverted more trust fund resources . . . thus starving general purpose roads of funds,'' and, ``Transit--including light rail, trolleys, and buses--marks the largest diversion. In 2010 alone, it received 17 percent, or $6 billion, of Federal highway user fees, even though it accounted for only 1 percent of the Nation's surface travel. Despite receiving a portion of Federal user fees for decades, transit has failed to reduce traffic congestion or even maintain its share of urban travel. For example, between 1983 and 2010, traffic volumes in the Nation's 51 major metropolitan areas increased by 87 percent, peak travel times in those areas increased by 125 percent, and transit's share of passenger miles fell by one-fourth.''

I encourage my colleagues to support this amendment.

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