Transportation, Housing, Urban Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016 and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2578, Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. Chairman, on behalf of a number of Western Representatives, I am proud to offer this bipartisan amendment, along with Mr. Coffman, Mr. Perlmutter, Mr. Schweikert, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, Ms. McSally, and Ms. DeGette.

As we know and as has often been mentioned here on the floor, transportation is the lifeblood of this country. It moves people, goods, ideas, and information. Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, and Broomfield, in my district, are some of the fastest growing cities in the country.

The majority of our tourists--over 46 million in 2014--make their way through the Denver Metro area; but the very things that make our State a popular home as well as a popular tourist destination--including hiking, biking, hunting, fishing, skiing--challenge growth and infrastructure as well.

Despite that fact that these cities are growing at significant rates and tourism is heavily congesting space, many of the major thoroughfares intersecting the region have not been expanded in decades.

Highway 70 West, our major tourism artery to our world-class ski resorts, stretches from the Denver Metro area out to our 14,000-foot peaks. I-25 North takes our visitors north of Denver and through Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins, all the way to Wyoming.

These two highways are effectively the only major arteries traveling north and west of Denver and the only option for residents and visitors to my district to even get out of Vail, Breckenridge, or Fort Collins; and in some places, these highways narrow to as little as two lanes, meaning hard-working constituents who commute every day across my district might wait for hours every day just to go back and forth.

Tourists, likewise, spend long times waiting to get out of their destination towns or to their our attractions.

Worse yet, Mr. Chairman, is a lack of a clear solution. You cannot simply expand a road that winds up some of the steepest peaks in the United States, and it is very costly to expand a tunnel under a large mountain.

One of the only good options that we have for quick, reliable, and affordable mass public transportation is bus rapid transit systems. On Highway 36, our main artery from Boulder to Denver, we recently began operating a BRT system with huge success.

This system shares a HOT lane with high-occupancy vehicles that allows for expedited and assured arrive times. It is used by hundreds of people every day for their commutes. That tool, however, was recently taken out of the toolbox for States across the West.

A hugely problematic change to our surface transportation and authorization MAP-21 bill 3 years ago was the heavy restrictions placed on project eligibility for capital investment grants that build BRT systems nationwide.

Unfortunately, for the first time in history, Congress required that BRT systems have access to an exclusive lane and operate as regularly during nonpeak weekday hours and weekends as they do during peak hours. That simply doesn't match the reality on the ground in places like Colorado and Arizona.

Mr. Chairman, we need access to these grants. The ability to create and innovate in transportation should be encouraged by Congress; yet we are removing the very critical area of investment for BRTs under the current MAP-21 rule, barring them from BRT eligibility because we don't have the capacity to add additional lanes, nor does it make any sense to reserve a lane solely for bus traffic, nor does it make any sense in our commuter and tourism corridors to have buses every couple of minutes on, let's say, a Tuesday at 2 p.m. or on a Sunday at 9 p.m. Ridership and data should drive these decisions, not Washington bureaucrats and not Congress.

My amendment would allow our States and localities the flexibility we need to create the best possible surface transportation system in our area. There simply isn't a one size fits all when it comes to growth and infrastructure.

I encourage this body to take into account the needs of States like Colorado and Arizona.

I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. Chairman, instead of giving top-down directives from Washington, we should be allowing for the equity of Federal resources and take into account local needs. What works for some transportation corridors might not work for others. We simply have different needs with regard to our computing patterns and tourism patterns in other areas of the country.

I am proud to bring up this amendment with a strong bipartisan coalition of Members, which includes Representatives Coffman, Perlmutter, Schweikert, DeGette, McSally, and Kirkpatrick, because we can't effectively discuss funding levels like those in the underlying bill without first putting in place equitable policies that encourage innovation for their disbursement.

I ask that my colleagues work with me and the coalition of Members I have named to find and enact a fix as we move forward with the transportation reauthorization later this summer.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Diaz-Balart) to see if he will be willing to work with us with regard to finding a fix on this policy issue.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source