Christian Y. Leinbach

During the summertime, water is on everyone's minds. Whether planning a trip to the Shoey Swimming Pool, cooling off by Blue Marsh Lake or fishing along the Tulley, many of us enjoy summertime recreation in and around water.TODAY'S SPONSOR:

Protecting water resources is something Berks County and county leaders across the country take seriously. Local governments play an important role in protecting water resources.

We are also charged with ensuring public safety. State and local governments own roads and roadside ditches, bridges, drainage and floodwater channels and other types of infrastructure that provide flood protection. In fact, Pennsylvania's local governments own 65 percent of the state's road miles and 27 percent of the state's bridges.

When a road floods because its roadside ditches are clogged, there could be dangerous and deadly consequences. If drainage ditches near our homes need to be cleaned out and the work is delayed while waiting for federal permits, the consequences could be devastating. It's up to state and local governments to respond to these dangerous situations and to prevent them from happening by providing regular maintenance.

That is why it is so troubling that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers will implement the final "Waters of the U.S." rule on Aug. 28 without seriously considering issues raised by local governments, who are responsible for carrying out the decisions federal agencies make that impact us.

The agencies proposed a one-size-fits-all strategy that draws little distinction between public safety ditches and a river or a stream.

As local leaders, we agree that valuable water resources and habitat for water species need to be protected. However, we disagree that all ditches, such as public safety ditches, should fall under federal permitting authority. The definition must be clear for us to know what the rule means for local governments and their citizens.

On the one hand, the federal agencies tell us ditches will be exempt. On the other hand, the rule tells us ditches will be regulated. So, what does the final rule actually say? One example is how the rule newly defines the term "tributary" and states that "a tributary can be a natural, man-altered or man-made water and includes waters such as rivers, streams, canals, and ditches."

If ditches are now classified as tributaries, and the new definition of tributary includes ditches, which ditches are exempt from federal regulation? We don't know.

These examples demonstrate how the final rule fails to achieve the goal of providing the clarity needed at the ground level for state and local governments to effectively implement this federal rule and protect both our valuable water resources and our citizens' safety. Because definitions within the rule remain unclear, local governments could be required to obtain additional federal permits to do routine maintenance work on roadside ditches or storm-water drains.

The federal permit process is time-consuming, cumbersome and expensive; not something local taxpayers can afford or should be forced to pay. This new red tape will slow down the permitting process even more and could jeopardize public safety by stopping or slowing basic maintenance that keep water off of roads and away from homes.

As a local government official tasked with protecting the environment while ensuring public safety, this is not a partisan issue, it is pragmatic. The cost of delays and fees due to additional federal regulatory permitting requirements could be significant to state and local governments. And, ultimately, it's our citizens who will pay the price.

It is also important to note that the Berks County Farm Bureau, through the Pennsylvania and American Farm Bureau are united in their opposition to this new rule for the same reasons. Since approximately 38 percent of Berks County is comprised of farmland, the final rule would have a significant impact on local farm operations. For more on this, visit http://ditchtherule.fb.org.

As a member and leader of the National Association of Counties, I am working with State and local government leaders to press lawmakers on Capitol Hill to pass legislation that would scrap this rule and ensure a collaborative rulemaking process with our federal partners to rewrite the rule. We hope U.S. Sens. Robert Casey and Patrick Toomey, along with the U.S. House of Representatives delegation, will support these efforts.

Counties and other local governments

are charged with upholding federal, state and local regulations that keep our water safe and clean, and we support common-sense environmental protections. All of us want clean water, but we cannot allow federal regulations to do more harm than good. Only when we work collaboratively with the state and federal government can we implement water regulations that work for all levels of government, while ensuring clean water and public safety for our residents.

Christian Y. Leinbach is chairman of the Berks County Board of Commissioners, and serves on the boards of County Commissioner's Association of Pennsylvania and the executive committee for the National Association of Counties.

Gov. Mary Fallin

Having safe, well-maintained roads and bridges is one of the most basic requirements of a healthy economy. Oklahoma is at the intersection of three major interstate highways, and we rely on a modern, functional and uncongested infrastructure system to transport an enormous quantity of goods across our borders every day.

Businesses choose to locate and expand where employees can come and go easily and where they can get their goods to market. Tourists visit (and spend money at) convenient locations that are easily accessible. For commuters, well-maintained roads are a quality-of-life-issue as well as an everyday necessity.

For all those reasons, when I first took office over five years ago, I asked Secretary of Transportation Gary Ridley to put in place an aggressive plan to improve and modernize our transportation infrastructure.

That plan began with a commitment to dramatically increase resources for the Department of Transportation (ODOT), which our Legislature delivered. Since 2011, Oklahoma has invested more than $1.6 billion to repair our crumbling state highway bridges. That investment has paid off; the number of structurally deficient highway bridges has been reduced from 706 at the beginning of 2011 to an estimated 372 at the end of 2014.

ODOT’s current eight-year plan is the most aggressive transportation improvement plan in state history. The plan includes almost 2,000 projects, including hundreds of bridge repairs, 657 miles of work on two-lane highways and 552 miles of repair and modernization on high-volume highways and interstates.

Our eight-year plan is fully funded and the work is on track. Some have pointed to minor cuts to this year’s ODOT budget and the county road and bridge fund (“CIRB”), necessary because of a downturn in the energy sector and a significant budget shortfall, as a signal the state is backing off its commitment to statewide road and bridge improvements.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While many agencies took small cuts this year, the fact of the matter is that state transportation funding in Oklahoma has tripled since 2005.

Additionally, legislation passed in 2012 locks the state into large investments in road and bridge projects.

It is true this summer’s bad weather, especially flooding, has added additional challenges to achieving our infrastructure goals. Many roads on both the state and county level were washed out or severely damaged. However, both ODOT and its partners at the Department of Emergency Management worked quickly to apply for and secure federal assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Currently, 59 counties have been approved for federal and state grants that will cover over 90 percent of the costs of any infrastructure damage.

Work in flood-damaged areas is ongoing, and almost $28 million in emergency contracts on the state and county systems have already been identified and are being expedited. In some counties, transportation infrastructure will actually improve because of flood repairs and an influx of additional federal resources.

Ultimately, the biggest hurdle to continuing road and bridge improvements is the passage of a federal transportation and highway funding bill.

Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe has practically done the impossible, guiding a multi-year transportation bill through that U.S. Senate that makes significant and responsible investments in U.S. transportation. He should be applauded for his efforts.

It is now the House of Representatives’ responsibility to make quick progress on this issue and ensure the great work being done on the state level can continue with the appropriate federal support.

Niels Lesniewski

Ask Sens. James M. Inhofe and Barbara Boxer about most issues, and they will disagree.

But when it comes to building roads and bridges, the conservative Oklahoma Republican and liberal California Democrat are in lockstep. That was on full display during a rare joint interview Tuesday afternoon, as they encouraged the House to move quickly after the Senate on a six-year highway bill, rather than allow the expected three-month extension to turn into a punt right up to another deadline ahead of Halloween.

“My preferred alternative is they get our bill as quickly as possible,” Boxer said. “It’s not up to me or Jim to write the House bill. It’s up to them. So, they’re going to have to do what we did. And then, if they feel they can take our bill with very small changes we could move it in a heartbeat. If they feel they need a conference, we can do that. But frankly, I don’t see why we have to wait to Halloween. We don’t have to trick the people.

“If they can take our bill, and look at it and see what good faith we had, this thing could move very quickly and we don’t have to wait to be tricked or treated,” Boxer said.

Inhofe, the Environment and Public Works chairman, stressed that the bulk of the Senate bill has been available for the House to review for weeks, but he said the House’s early departure would not affect his resolve in getting the six-year bill done.

“I have talked to members of the House about what’s in this bill, and a lot of them are very supportive. Of course they would want naturally to have some things so they can say … probably more legitimately this is ours, not the Senate’s,” Inhofe said. “We’ve done the hard work, and they can go ahead and do what they have to do.”

Inhofe reiterated that the plan working through the Senate is a more conservative approach because of the inherent inefficiency of stopgap funding and the fact big projects cannot be contracted on yet another short-term extension.

“The House, I don’t think, ever believed that we were going to get a six-year bill passed … before the deadlines,” Inhofe said.

The two senators are proving once again that where their interests intersect, they form a powerful odd couple. And this time, they’re getting plenty of help from an equally unusual pair. Boxer and Inhofe praised Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., for their help in getting a six-year highway plan in position to get across the finish line, even if the House is scheduled to leave Wednesday for August recess.

To combat the usual instinct to kick the can, the senators also brought in outside stakeholders from their respective camps, from organized labor to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The bulk of the transportation measure falls under Inhofe’s committee’s jurisdiction, and the Inhofe-Boxer partnership is an example of how deals get done.

“I had to back off on some of my requests, he had to back off on some of his. We both took a little poison pill we didn’t want. We got a bill, 20 to nothing,” Boxer said. “And I think what happened in the other committees frankly is they didn’t have the same bipartisan spirit, so it was very difficult, and some of them never actually marked up at all, so it was difficult.”

“They weren’t preparing for this thing as timely as we were,” Inhofe said. “The model I think that we can be is you have two people who are pretty well-known for their diverse philosophy from each other, and yet when some things rise to the point where it’s beyond just a personal prejudiced position and it’s for the good of the country, you can rise above it. I think we’ve seen that before. We’ve seen that in the education bill.” (The Senate passed an overhaul of elementary and secondary education bill earlier in the summer under the leadership of Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Democrat Patty Murray of Washington.)

The ability to get such a bill through the Senate is dependent on trust, and Boxer and Inhofe have worked together on transportation since 2005.

“We backed off the super poison pills, let’s be clear. In other words, if Jim had attached — I don’t even want to say it because he’ll get mad … we’re going to repeal all environmental laws,” Boxer said. “He knows he can’t get that by me, and I couldn’t do things you know, where I just said all the labor laws, we want to strengthen them and make labor more powerful in negotiations. Of course not.”

Inhofe mentioned some of the wish-list items he had to forego.

“Endangered species things. I would [have liked] to have had something in there where we have an exemption from … the obstacles in the construction of roads, and so you know neither Barbara or I were victorious,” he said.

“I would have loved to have seen just two words in there: ‘climate change,’ and I knew Jim would not stand by for that, so why would I do that?” Boxer said of her colleague, who famously wrote a book calling global warming a hoax. “I think the most important lesson here is we know each other so well, and that’s very helpful. We know what to say to each other to get each other really over the top mad, and we know how we can work together. So, we avoided those hot, hot, hot button issues.”

Ask them about Inhofe’s hearings on overreach at the Environmental Protection Agency or debate on a pending toxic substances bill, and the two senators quickly retreat to their respective partisan corners. But when they do agree — watch out.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

The stature of Congress is rarely enhanced by highway bills, and this season’s is no exception. Allow us to try to distinguish the cynicism from the disinformation from the political scheming, which is even more convoluted than usual.

The core problem is that the Highway Trust Fund pumps out more for U.S. road, bridge and transit projects each year than it collects in dedicated gas taxes. The last six-year, “long-term” highway bill passed in 2005, and Congress has since topped up the account with 33 infusions from general revenues totaling $65 billion. For all the commotion before the trust fund re-defaults on July 31, neither the House nor Senate is trying to solve this spending-revenue mismatch.

This month the House passed an $8 billion patch that shores up the fund through Christmas. The interim bill is meant to buy time for negotiations among Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, the White House and Paul Ryan. The Ways and Means Chairman is attempting to work out a larger tax deal, and we reported the pros and cons in “A Tax Reform for Highways Trade?” (July 13).

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In the Senate a bipartisan group is trying to pass a “long-term” bill, by which they mean six years of increased road spending and three years of Mickey Mouse funding. With an assist from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, this pork tenderloin was prepared by Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe and California Democrat Barbara Boxer, who usually seem to detest each other, which should tell you something.

For the better part of a year, Senate Democrats have demanded that Mr. McConnell wave through “a robust, long-term surface transportation bill,” as Harry Reid and his leadership colleagues put it in a letter as recently as July 9. But Democratic leaders have now U-turned and endorse the five-month House bill. Mr. Reid and wingman Chuck Schumer will then try to use the Ryan-Lew talks to buffalo the GOP into increasing taxes, busting the sequester budget caps and extracting even more spending than a mere highway bill.

But Ms. Boxer is telling rank-and-file Democrats that the guarantee of a budget windfall now is better than a political wager that depends on agreement by the House GOP. The irony is that Mr. McConnell is rallying most of his conference by saying the White House can’t be trusted and the tax reform colloquy is a trap for Senate Republicans who must defend 24 seats in 2016.

Defusing a potential GOP election-year liability is one of the few compelling arguments for the bill. Inhofe-Boxer makes token changes to the Highway Trust Fund to improve accountability and prioritize some projects like freight shipping that will contribute to the economy. It also streamlines environmental permitting and modestly expands the Tifia bonds program that underwrites innovative public-private highway financing.

But mainly the bill is a slightly larger status quo. Transportation spending would increase by $76 billion above current law, or about 3% a year. Politicians in Washington will still pick winner and loser states as they have since Eisenhower. The bike trails, scenic overlooks and trolley cars that consumed 25 cents of every gas-tax dollar in 2014 will proceed as scheduled.

To paper over the shortfall between spending and gas tax receipts, the Senate bill uses the familiar gimmick of counting revenue over 10 years to finance spending over three. The House bill uses a decade of savings to pay for only five months of spending. Mr. McConnell also turned over the couch cushions to find spare change like some $7.79 billion from tax compliance measures (“revocation or denial of passport in case of certain unpaid taxes”). The feds will also sell $9 billion of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and so on.

The worst part is the capitulation to using non-transportation funds for the capital and operating costs of transportation. The virtue of gas taxes is user pays, user benefits. If the tax has become less of a proxy for transportation consumption due to more efficient cars and lower energy prices, then prioritize federal highway money for the most urgent national needs and devolve more power to the states and cities, which can use tolls and their own fuel levies to lay asphalt.

A real long-term bill with fresh thinking would give more responsibility to Governors, who are more likely to invest in repair, maintenance and modernization. We’re not among those who think the federal government has no role to play in highways, but no doubt Americans can and would pay to relieve congestion and encourage interstate commerce if they had more confidence in the stewards of those dollars. Local control would mitigate the vanity projects and boondoggles that too often define federal highway spending.

***

The House bill introduces no such reform either, though at least Mr. Ryan is trying to redeem the bacchanal with pro-growth tax reform. To understand the appetites Mr. Ryan is trying to exploit, Mr. Schumer got in a tussle with Ms. Boxer on the Senate floor because he wants to use Mr. McConnell’s “pay-fors” to increase spending other than highways, and her bill could pre-empt the tax increases that the White House calls tax reform.

Oh, and one more complication: The Senate bill is likely to include a revival of the Export-Import Bank, which isn’t in the House bill and which many conservatives oppose. Mr. McConnell says he won’t attach Ex-Im to a short-term highway extension, which is another incentive for House Republicans to oppose the Senate bill.

Some kind of unreformed highway bill is bound to pass. Ex-Im aside, the choice comes down to whether you favor Mr. McConnell’s strategy as the best way to help the GOP keep Senate control in 2016, or whether like Mr. Ryan you want to take a gamble that PresidentObama will negotiate a corporate tax reform in good faith. Our heart is with Mr. Ryan but our head sides with Mr. McConnell.