Thursday, November 3, 2011
Floor Speech: A national infrastructure bank is a creative approach to critical investment
As Delivered on November 3, 2011
I rise today to speak about one way forward out of it, and I think one of the reasons why there is so much frustration with Congress and the general public is there is broad support for some simple solutions to get Americans back to work, to revive and strengthen our economy that we just seem incapable of reaching across this partisan divide and moving forward.
One of those is an infrastructure bank. I rise today to follow up on a speech I gave yesterday about why investing in American infrastructure means investing in America's future.
Infrastructure, building roads and bridges, highways and sewer systems, modernizing America's backbone enjoys very broad support from all across the United States, from all different sectors because Americans understand it will put folks back to work, into building trades industry that have taken the hardest hit in this recession, and in a way that will lay the groundwork for our long-term future competitiveness.
This is smart spending. This is investing in the best tradition of federal, state, local, private partnerships to make America more competitive for the future. Today, I want to talk about one element of the bill, which I hope we will move to later today. The American Infrastructure Financing Authority or known more colloquially as the National Infrastructure Bank.
If this idea sounds familiar, it's because it has already been introduced, it's a bipartisan bill, the BUILD Act, championed by Senator Kerry and Senator Hutchison. And of which I am a cosponsor, and one that provides a creative financing vehicle for building infrastructure going forward.
As you know, Mr. President, before becoming a senator in the election last year, just a year ago yesterday, I served for six years as the county executive of Delaware's largest county, and one of the things our county was responsible for was running a countywide sewer system. We had 1,800 miles of sanitary sewer, and it was a constant challenge to maintain. That's a lot of pipe, a lot of pump stations and a lot of sewage backing up in people's homes in the middle of the night, which led to a lot of aggravated calls from constituents. It was an aging system, like so much of America's infrastructure, one in which we had underinvested for too long. And from personal experience, I can tell you that the lack of that infrastructure, of adequate sewer capacity, was a major barrier to future growth.
So, too, across states and counties and cities all over this country, where the roads and rail, the ports and the sewer systems aren't up to current global standards, we can't expect to grow to meet our global competitors. When we talk about capital infrastructure improvements at the local level in the government I used to be with, it wasn't some wish list, this wasn't some future technology, this wasn't some risky investment. It was triage. It was critically needed investment in pipes in the ground that would protect our water, strengthen our community and grow our economy.
As a nation, the American Society of Civil Engineers has told us we need $2.2 trillion over just the next five years in infrastructure investments to keep America moving forward. We're talking about fixing unsafe bridges, dealing with clogged highways and rebuilding airports so they can handle larger modern aircraft safely.
That is an enormous scope, Mr. President. $2.2 trillion over just the next five years. We're already asking so much of the Super Committee in terms of finding dramatic savings, reductions in federal spending.
Where will this level of investment come from to put America back to work?
In my view, we have to get creative. We have to leverage. We have to bring in more resources than are currently on the field. And especially now, especially in this country, I think we have to be smart about how we spend our funds. The Rebuild America Jobs Act, to which I hope we will be moving later this afternoon, would put $50 billion directly into infrastructure but $10 billion as a down payment into making possible this new infrastructure bank. Seed money that makes possible loans and loan guarantees, not grants, for a wide range of infrastructure projects including energy, water and critically needed transportation.
Remember, we need more than $400 billion a year in investment right now just to keep up, but we all know that the constrained budgets of our county, state and local governments can't get the financing they need. This infrastructure bank would provide the leverage, a vehicle to finance desperately needed projects.
Just a few things about it: It would be for big projects, projects that cost more than $25 million in rural communities, $100 million in the rest of the country. It would only be allowed to finance up to 50% of a project to avoid crowding out private capital, to make sure that private capital has got skin in the game so it's a viable project. It's my expectation, in fact, that the infrastructure bank would finance a much smaller piece of most projects, just enough to bring private investment to the table. It would be government owned but independently operated, have its own bipartisan board of directors and function much like the successful Export-Import Bank.
An infrastructure bank passed by the Senate this week could provide up to $160 billion in direct financial assistance over its first ten years to infrastructure for transportation, and that would be paired with private investment that could double, triple or even quadruple increasing the full impact of this bank.
I said yesterday, Mr. President, that infrastructure is a smart investment for our country, that a national
infrastructure bank, as a part of that strategy, would provide a vehicle for the private sector to get in on this investment as well and to help us accelerate our move towards the future. This, Mr. President, is smart policy.
It’s a funny thing about infrastructure, how we inevitably take it for granted, whether you are running a state highway system or a county sewer system, you never know how much people miss it until it isn't working the way they expect. And, unfortunately, in cities, counties, and states across our country today, companies and communities are discovering that our aged infrastructure is imposing costs on us that we just can't bear.
The American society of civil engineers, which I have referred to before, recently released a study saying that our nation’s deteriorating surface transportation infrastructure alone results in the loss of nearly a million jobs and will suppress our G.D.P. growth by nearly $1 trillion between now and 2020. That's an enormous loss of future economic activity. In my view, we can't put this off any further. As a country, we can't keep swerving to avoid these potholes on the path to prosperity. Eventually we're going to hit them and eventually they are going to continue to be a drag on our nation. The Rebuild America Jobs Act would fill these potholes, would patch these pipes, would lay the new runways to allow America’s economy to take off.
In my view, this Rebuild America Jobs Act, which would rebuild 150,000 miles of roadway, maintain 4,000 miles of train track, upgrade 150 miles of airport runways, restore critical drinking water and waste water systems, is nothing short of the smart investment we need to be competitive for the future. It would put people back to work, it would steer us on the right road to sustained recovery, and it would fix the problems that lie right in our path as we try to do our jobs, Mr. President, for the folks who hired us to come here and help them get back to work.
We need to act today and it is my hope that my colleagues will join us this afternoon in voting for the motion to proceed to the recovery and Rebuild America Jobs Act. A critical piece of which is this smart infrastructure bank.
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