Thursday, March 20, 2003

Mr. BOND. Today, along with a number of my colleagues, I want to address an amendment which is at the desk, amendment No. 358 to the Senate budget resolution. I am very pleased to be joined in this by Senator Reid of Nevada, Senator Inhofe, Senator Jeffords--all three from the EPW committee--as well as Senators SHELBY, SARBANES, WARNER, MURRAY, MURKOWSKI, BYRD, CHAFEE, FEINSTEIN, COLLINS, SPECTER, LEVIN, LOTT, REED of Rhode Island, and BROWNBACK.

This amendment would increase the budget allocations to $255 billion for highway infrastructure, and $56.5 billion for mass transit needs over the 6-year period fiscal year 2004 to fiscal year 2009.

Before these numbers startle some of my colleagues and good friends, like my friends on the Budget Committee, let me remind my colleagues we are not abandoning the ``user pays'' concept of the Highway Trust Fund. In fact, over the past several years, a great deal of money has been stolen or diverted out of the Highway Trust Fund, paid in by highway users, that rightfully should have gone for road improvements.

For example, highway users started paying a 2.5 cent tax in 1990 with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 that never went to road improvements. It went to the general fund instead. The tax even grew to as high as 6.8 cents in 1994 and 1995, and over the years, highway users have paid well over $40 billion--that is a conservative estimate--$40 billion which never went into the highway trust fund. In addition, the highway trust fund lost revenues as a result of alternative fuel vehicles. I support alternative fuel vehicles, whether they run on hydrogen or electricity or some other form of energy. But we also must remember that [Page: S4126] GPO's PDF these alternatively fueled vehicles travel on the roads. They use the roads. They crowd the roads. They are, in fact, burdens on the roads. And they must somehow pay some share, just as those vehicles fueled by gas or diesel pay for a share.

Some very significant constituents have spoken out about the needs for the highway trust fund. I have letters of support, that I will offer later, from affiliated labor unions engaged in transportation, construction, and the broader Transportation Construction Coalition, the Highway Users Alliance, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Governors Association, and others.

I daresay we have all heard from our respective State transportation officials, our metropolitan planning organizations, from our labor unions, our friends in the transportation industries, and others about the needs. But perhaps more importantly, we have all seen the congestion, the potholes covered with steel plates, the bridges down to one lane.

If any of you who have done what I have done, and had an open meeting in a townhall forum in the last several months as we came up on the reauthorization of TEA-21, you have heard that our citizens are concerned about inadequate transportation. They are really chafing at the bit because in too many areas our country is strangling.

Now, we have all waited in traffic, hoped our car's alignment would not be permanently damaged, and looked down through a bridge to see the water below.

We have also comforted far too many friends and families who have lost loved ones because of unsafe roads or bridges. I still correspond with families who have made getting decent highways their cause to remember a loved one who was killed because of an inadequate highway system with too much traffic on it.

Our Nation has some needs. This little chart shows in red what the President proposed in his budget. What the Budget Committee has come out with is shown in green. And what this Bond-Reid amendment would do is shown in blue. As you can see, these start going up a little bit.

You may ask, what is this big yellow line way up here above all of them, even well above the blue line? Well, it is simply this administration's own estimate of the cost simply to maintain the current system; that is, not to get it any better. Just to keep it as it is, we should be spending this much, as shown in yellow. Right now, this budget has us spending what is shown in the green. We really need to get up at least to this high, as shown in the blue, so we can begin to try to keep up with the needs.

We know our Nation's transportation needs are staggering and our constrained transportation system is costing our country a whole lot of time and money. We know it is time to do something about it.

The transportation system is a lifeline of our country and our economy. I was a student of American history. The economic history of America really began when railroads tied together this Nation and brought it as a whole economic unit. Railroads were the tie that bound us together in the 19th century. In the 20th century, it became the highway system. The highway system provides mobility. It provides transportation for economic activities. It, in essence, brings jobs.

I can tell you, in the years I spent as Governor of Missouri, I spent an awful lot of time working on economic development. It was one of my top priorities. And I could see, economic development was going by where the roads went. If you build a good four-lane road, jobs will go there. Jobs and economic opportunity require good transportation. Not all jobs. We have e-mail and telecommunications. But distribution requires a good transportation system.

I can tell you, for the 21st century, it is not only good railroads, it is not only good roads and highways, it is good transportation systems, it is good air transportation, it is good water transportation, and it is good mass transportation that is going to be essential for our growth.

Looking at the road side of it, in my home State of Missouri the problems are diverse and complex. To highlight just a few of the glaring examples: Commercial truck traffic is expected to increase 89 percent by the year 2020. The cities of St. Louis and Kansas City spend over $1 billion each year on costs associated with traffic congestion. Fatalities on Missouri highways are considerably higher than the national average--nearly 7,000 people were killed between 1995 and 2000 on our highways.

How will this broad range of problems be adequately and appropriately addressed? The answer simply is investment--investment in the future of our Nation's surface transportation to promote safety, to increase employment, to decrease congestion, and to enhance security. In order to meet these needs, Federal, State, and local government investment will have to be significantly increased. Our amendment we offer today will allow it to do so at a very modest rate compared to the true needs, but without raising gas taxes and diesel taxes at this time. I want to emphasize to my colleagues, this transportation responsibility is a duty of the Federal Government. Road building is one activity that the Government should administer but in coordination with the private sector and other levels of government. If we do not want the responsibility at the national level, or if we are unwilling to fund it, then let's quit calling our I-70s, our I-80s, our I-5s, our I-95s, and our other interstates by those names.

When President Dwight Eisenhower first proposed the interstate highways, if I remember correctly--I was a youngster at the time--our Nation's defense was the primary focus, the national defense highway system.

Now terrorism threatening our homeland requires an adequate defense network to get the people, the law enforcement, the military, to prevent actions, to bring in responders where there is an action, to give people a means away from an area of danger. These all require good roads and highways.

To demonstrate the enormity of this crucial task of relieving congestion and building highway infrastructure, we have to examine the costs involved. A report by the Nation's State transportation officials found that $92 billion will be needed on an annual basis just to maintain the current conditions of highways and to keep traffic from getting worse. However, if our goal were to be as I think it should be--to improve significantly the overall condition of U.S. highways, enhancing safety standards, reducing traffic congestion; a goal that I think is critical to the protection of American lives as well as our economy, the study showed that more would be needed, a total of $125 billion annually.

Now, those figures do not even include the additional $19 billion in capital investments required each year to maintain existing road conditions and service levels. Clearly, this will be a massive and expensive effort.

Increased funding for transportation will also have other beneficial effects. It creates jobs at a time when many businesses around the country are heading in the reverse and are contracting. The added investment for transportation will serve to directly stimulate the economy. Every billion dollars of investment is 47,000 jobs. Naturally, this will contribute to the prosperity of American communities by bringing a wide variety of benefits to people in every State and every location across the country. The increased investments in roads will help satisfy many of our needs currently and for the future.

Unfortunately, the administration's 2004 budget provides allocations that remain wholly inadequate for conquering the ever-growing needs of the people who use our Nation's transportation infrastructure. It is the status quo funding. Again, our amendment will increase spending authority on highways to $255 billion and on mass transit to $56.5 billion over the 6-year life of the TEA-21 reauthorization bill. As my colleagues know, a budget resolution amendment is all about numbers and not about specific requirements. However, I will offer some ideas and thoughts because there is a menu of sources and options, so you can understand where that money comes from.

Let me go over a few of the aspects. The $255 billion increase over the budget, where does that come from: 5.2 cents on the ethanol tax incentive fix, something the Finance Committee is going to work on; spending down the trust fund balances. This was proposed by the President in his budget, and it is proposed in the Budget Committee's markup that we extend that. We provide interest credit on the balances, and we restore a lost $8 billion in TEA-21; $8 billion just disappeared from the trust fund. We put that back. We maintain the historic relationship between contract authority and obligation limitations. I will forgo a description of the contract authority and obligation limits. I don't think it is necessary to add further confusion at this point. But let me say we straighten out the problem that the underlying budget amendment has. 1. Then we ought to have fair share funding for alternative fuel vehicles--electric hybrids, natural gas, recognizing the loss to the fund for these vehicles which pay little or nothing into the trust fund but cause the same damage to roadways. This is vitally important, as is cracking down on tax evasion and compliance initiatives, dealing with those who avoid the taxes or otherwise have been excluded from paying for their use of our roads and highways. This increased investment authorized by our amendment will decrease congestion, enhance security, help to create jobs, stimulate the economy, and, most importantly, will save American lives by improving safety on the highways.

These are the highway-related fatalities in thousands, beginning with 39.3 thousand in 1992, reaching as high as 42.1 thousand in 1996, and again in 2001, over 40,000 people killed in each of these years, too many of them because of inadequate highways. It is not an option to stand idle in the wake of these conditions. I urge my colleagues to support our amendment. I ask unanimous consent to print letters of endorsement for this proposal.