Contact: Ernie Blazar 202.224.7627 Shana Stribling 202.224.0309
Friday, March 21, 2003

WASHINGTON – The United States Senate today adopted a bi-partisan amendment authored by Senator Kit Bond to boost federal highway and mass transit spending by approximately $10 billion per year for the next six years.

The vote was 79-21.

Today's action means that the Senate's budget blueprint for the next fiscal year, which begins October 1, 2003, now has room to spend up to $255 billion for federal highways and $56.5 billion for mass transit over the next six years. That is a 28.9 percent increase over the Senate Budget Committee's report which included only $206 billion for federal highways and $44 billion for mass transit. Budget resolutions such as this one never become law, but they do provide other Senate Committees with spending limits. That includes the Senate Environment and Public Works Transportation Subcommittee, which Bond chairs and is responsible for the reauthorization of the current federal highway bill (TEA-21).

Joining Bond on this amendment were Senators Harry Reid (D-NV), ranking member of the Transportation Subcommittee and Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Chairman of the full EPW Committee and Jim Jeffords, ranking Democrat on EPW. Also joining Bond were Senators Rick Shelby (R-AL) and Patty Murray (D-WA), chairman and ranking member of the Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee. Shelby is also chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over Mass Transit. The ranking Democrat on the full Appropriations Committee, Robert Byrd (D-WV) also supported the amendment from its inception.

"Higher federal highway spending provides an immediate and long-term boost to the economy and that means good-paying jobs," said Bond, who along with Inhofe, will rewrite the six-year, federal highway bill this year. "This is the best kind of economic stimulus."

A boost in federal highway spending is acutely needed in Missouri. Commercial truck traffic in Missouri is expected to increase 89% by the year 2020; St. Louis and Kansas City spend over a billion dollars each year on costs associated with traffic congestion; fatalities on Missouri highways are considerably higher than the national average nearly seven thousand people were killed between 1995 to 2000 on our highways.