With Chairman Oberstar's leadership we followed every cent of transportation funding and ensured it was spent on critical infrastructure projects. Today nearly 10,000 infrastructure projects have been completed, improving communities and putting people back to work.
Unfortunately, Republicans refuse to take this great news sitting down and have chosen instead to waste both time and money attacking the Recovery Act. In fact, it seems the Republicans gave less scrutiny to going to war in Iraq than they have to the decision making process for high speed rail. Even the GAO study commissioned at the behest of Chairman Mica concluded that “The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) established a fair and objective approach for distributing these funds and substantially followed discretionary grant award practices used throughout the government”.
Let me make it clear that no one was given funding that they didn’t request. Every entity that received rail funding through the stimulus was subject to the same rigorous application process. To review the final applications, FRA created merit review panels that included career staff from FRA, FTA, and the Volpe Center. In addition, FRA established a technical review panel to ensure consistency of its evaluations. After review of the applications, the technical review panels submitted evaluations and recommendations to FRA and DOT senior leadership who in turn applied four additional selection criteria to make the final selection.
We are experiencing a renaissance in passenger rail in this country, and if we want to keep up with our international competitors, we need to make a significant investment in passenger and high-speed rail. I’ve advocated for and support a dedicated source of funding for rail and would encourage the committee to include a minimum of $50 billion dollars for high-speed and intercity passenger rail over the life of the bill. Compared to the funding levels in the overall bill and the money being spent in other countries on rail, $50 billion is a drop in the bucket.
Although we have some very small thinking Governors, support for high-speed rail is still high. The FRA received more than 90 applications totally nearly $10 billion dollars from 24 states, the District of Columbia, and Amtrak for the $2.4 billion that Florida just gave up. This included an application from the state of Wisconsin, whose governor foolishly returned the rail money it had already received from FRA.
The stimulus bill has proven that transportation infrastructure funding provides a benefit to the community and puts people back to work. For every billion dollars in infrastructure funding, 44,000 good-paying, permanent jobs are created. And that is exactly what our country needs.
With that, I want to welcome our panelists, and I look forward to hearing their testimony.