Contact: Rob Ostrander 202.224.7627 Shana Stribling 202.224.0309
Friday, May 21, 2004

WASHINGTON – Senator Kit Bond today announced he will play a lead role in negotiating a final transportation bill as the House and Senate head to conference after Democrats abandoned their efforts to block the bill from moving forward.

"This bill is the single most important bill we can pass this year," said Bond, who helped write the transportation bill as chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee. "Jobs and highway safety are at stake. I look forward to working to produce a bipartisan bill that will provide the resources we need to help Missouri build a stronger and safer transportation system. Congress needs to move quickly to pass this bill."

Last month, in an effort to highlight Democratic attempts to block progress on the bill, Bond put a hold on legislation to extend current highway and transit programs and blasted Senate Democrats for delaying action on the transportation bill by blocking the naming of Senate conferees.

"Four times last month Majority Leader Frist and I went to the Senate floor to appoint highway bill conferees and four times Senate Democrats objected," said Bond. "At that time I made public promises to continue our bipartisan work through Conference. But for some reason my colleagues continued to filibuster the bill. Finally, thanks to continued pressure from the grassroots level my colleagues have realized that people want progress, not politics when it comes to safety and security on our nations roads and bridges."

"Democrats concluded they could no longer block a bill that creates jobs and saves lives," said Senator Kit Bond. "While this is good news, the fact is we have already lost a significant portion of this year's construction season because of Democratic obstructionism."

As recently as Friday, a broad statewide coalition of Missouri labor groups, business groups, civic leaders, elected officials and construction organizations joined with Bond in sending a letter to Senate leaders urging an end to the partisan politics delaying action on the highway bill.

The groups signing the letter ranged from the Greater Kansas City Building and Construction Trades Council, AFL-CIO to the Mayors of Kansas City, St. Louis and Columbia, to the Missouri Farm Bureau and the St. Louis Regional Business Council.

Under the $318 billion Senate bill, Missouri would receive approximately $1.4 billion in new transportation dollars to improve Missouri roads and help create an estimated 69,000 jobs for the state.

Joining Bond as Senate conferees will be Republican Sens. Inhofe, Warner, Voinovich, McCain, Shelby, Grassley, Hatch, Nickles, Lott, and McConnell. Democrat conferees include Sens. Reid, Baucus, Graham, Lieberman, Daschle, Conrad, Hollings and Sarbanes, along with Independent Sen. James Jeffords.