(Washington, DC) Congresswoman Corrine Brown made the following statement:
“Our nation needs and deserves a well funded multi modal transportation system, yet this bill does anything but that. In fact, this proposal has the potential to bleed our nation of approximately half a million jobs (including over 20,000 in my state of Florida), by imposing significant cuts to our transportation programs.
The Transportation & Infrastructure Committee is the most partisan it has been in history, and the Democrats have not been involved in any way in the drafting of this legislation.
Certainly, at a time when our nation’s unemployment rate remains above 9 percent, an adequately funded six year surface transportation reauthorization bill is crucial. What our country needs is a Surface Transportation bill that strengthens our infrastructure, provides quality jobs, and serves as a tool to put America back on a path toward long-term economic growth, not one that drags us in the wrong direction by drastically underfunding our system. The Republican proposal before us today would only fund our nation’s transportation and infrastructure system at a level of between $215 billion and $230 billion, far less than a $286 billion bill approved in 2005 that many highway proponents said even at that time was deeply inadequate.
Transportation and Infrastructure funding is absolutely critical to the nation, and, if properly funded, serves as a tremendous economic and job creator. In fact, Department of Transportation (DOT) statistics show that for every $1 billion invested in transportation infrastructure, 44,000 jobs are created, as is $6.2 billion in economic activity.
Indeed, our nation’s long term prosperity requires that we invest in our infrastructure. In the not so distant past, our transportation system used to be the best in the world, but investments have not kept up with the needs, and the U.S. continues to fall behind other nations. China, for example, currently spends nearly 9% of its GDP on infrastructure, while we are spending a meager 2%. Clearly, this lack of investment has led to a crumbling of our infrastructure system as a whole, leading the American Society of Civil Engineers, in their 2009 "Report Card for America's Infrastructure" to give the United States a grade of D.
It is obvious that this woefully underfunded bill needs to be pronounced DOA – Dead on Arrival! Instead of creating good jobs, it increases our nation’s unemployment rate, and rather than improve our infrastructure, brings about greater deterioration.”