The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Transportation was published in the Senate section on pages S3446-S3447 on June 5, 2014.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE
Mr. COONS. Mr. President, in my home State of Delaware today we have a problem. Just this week the critical I-495 bridge over the Christina River in Wilmington--which carries more than 90,000 drivers each and every day, north and south on this critical artery on the east coast of the United States--was closed indefinitely.
While engineers and workers were on an unrelated project in the area, they noticed that four of the key pillars holding up the bridge were alarmingly slanted, causing widespread concerns about the bridge's safety and prompt action to shut it down.
Now as the Delaware Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration do everything they can to get to the bottom of this problem and to work to make this bridge safe again, tens of thousands of commuters are forced onto already crowded streets and highways, creating even worse traffic for everyone in our area, hurting our economy, and taking people away from where they need to be.
It is, sadly, yet another example--one that hits particularly close to home for me--in a string of major infrastructure emergencies, some due to unforeseeable events, and some due to a long-term critical lack of investment that signifies why investment in our infrastructure is so important.
Every day when Americans drive to work or drop off their kids at school, they make a simple bargain, an unconscious bargain with their government: They assume the roads will be safe to drive on. They expect that if they drive safely, they will be able to get to where they need to go in a reasonable amount of time.
Unfortunately, it has been quite clear that while Americans keep doing what they can to move our Nation and our economy forward, we here in Congress aren't holding up our end of the bargain. We aren't meeting our responsibilities to invest in critical areas that we all know need work. We have a lot of infrastructure needs, but we simply aren't keeping up with them today.
This is about the end of the school year for most families with kids in school around the country. Like many other parents, I was going over with my kids what they think their grades are at the end of the year. Well, the country also gets a grade. We get a grade from the American Society for Civil Engineers. These are the folks whose job it is to manage and supervise and survey the health and capabilities of our infrastructure--our bridges and roads and highways. This group, the American Society for Civil Engineers, gave our roadways a D.
The Federal Highway Administration estimates that we are dramatically behind in investing in keeping our highways and bridges and tunnels up to speed. They say we need $170 billion more in capital investments every year to improve road conditions and performance.
That group of civil engineers, the ASCE, has also determined a quarter of our bridges are functionally obsolete or structurally deficient. In little old Delaware, that comes to 175 bridges that fail to meet what we would all expect of our government--Federal and State and county and local governments--that we maintain bridges to the highest level of safety that we would expect.
We will always face unforeseen crises and challenges, but this is one we can see coming. There may be hurricanes such as the great Superstorm Sandy that wiped out a lot of infrastructure in my region or there may be other unforeseeable events that impact our transportation infrastructure. But this one we have been seeing coming for years.
This inconvenience in Delaware--the closing of the critical bridge on 495 that has put so many at inconvenience--was nowhere near the biggest transportation disaster we have had in recent years. Just last year in Washington State, the Skagit River Bridge, built in 1955, literally collapsed after a truck drove into its framework. Seventy-one thousand drivers were using that bridge on a daily basis.
I think many of us remember, way back in August of 2007, tragedy struck Minneapolis when its I-35 West Bridge, which extends over the Mississippi River, literally collapsed under the rush hour traffic weight. More than 100 cars were thrown into the water, 13 people lost their lives, and 145 were injured.
If we don't act soon--together--we are going to face many more such tragic incidents like these. We have to address this problem and get over our unwillingness together to invest in infrastructure that we all depend on and value.
The simple fact, as I have said, is current Federal investments are not keeping pace with our needs. We are, sadly, months away from exhausting the Federal highway trust fund--the trust fund that finances much of the highway, bridge, and tunnel work around the country on the Interstate Highway System--because the gas tax that funds it hasn't risen in 20 years, but the amount of gas being consumed and thus gas tax revenue generated has gone down. Yet we don't seem here to have the political will to implement a solution to this basic problem that folks have been saying is coming at us, hurtling like an oncoming truck for years.
We talk a lot about our children--about the kind of world we want to leave them, about our hopes for the future, and it is just one of the reasons I am so concerned about our Nation's long-term balance sheet. Many of us talk about our Nation's deficits and our potentially crippling Federal debt. It is irresponsible of us to continue to rack up debt on our national balance sheet and leave it to our children and grandchildren. But I highlight today that when we neglect our transportation infrastructure--our highways and tunnels and roads and ports and bridges--these are things we use every single day in transporting our families and ourselves or goods to and from work or to and from home, to school, to soccer, to vacation. These are critical pieces of the American infrastructure. We are also racking up a huge debt there too. These investments have to be made one way or the other. I know we value these systems because we depend on them every day.
So if we can't come together in the short term to fix the highway trust fund, I am left to wonder how we are going to come together on the much larger problem of meeting our broader infrastructure needs, of which that trust fund is one small but crucial part. We face short-
term, medium-term, and long-term problems. As I said, we have to fix this highway trust fund before it runs out of funding this summer. It is what often funds 80 percent of State highway work. It is a critical part of construction projects already scheduled to go on this summer. We have kept it funded by transferring money from the general fund for the last few years, but that is not how it is supposed to work. So we have got to come to terms with a solution that is responsible and meets this challenge.
We have a range of options, but none of them are appealing: Increasing the gas tax, putting a surcharge on vehicles, charging for vehicle miles traveled. All of these are unappealing politically, but it is essential that we come up with something to solve this long-term problem.
I thank Chairman Wyden of the Finance Committee, who is working hard with other members of that committee even today to find a path forward and a solution.
Second, in the medium term, we have to reauthorize--we have to approve--ongoing work for highways, roads, and bridges, and we need to have a reauthorization for surface transportation by this fall. The Chair and ranking member of the relevant committee--Barbara Boxer of California and Dave Vitter of Louisiana--have shown, as has my senior Senator Tom Carper from Delaware, who also serves on this committee, that Federal infrastructure investment is a bipartisan value. They have been able to come out of that committee with bipartisan reauthorizations a number of times over the last couple of years, and that is encouraging to me.
We also, a few minutes ago, came out of the transportation subcommittee markup on appropriations, the committee that says: Here is how much we will spend. That came out with a very strong bipartisan vote earlier today and will come to the floor in the next few months. This progress is encouraging, but it doesn't mean anything if we don't have a way to pay the bill when the bill comes due. We need to figure out how to finance infrastructure for the long term in this country.
There are several bills with good ideas that have been put forward in this committee and in this Chamber. I have supported two bills. One is called the BRIDGE Act and the other is called the Partnership to Build America Act. These bills will provide the critical steps we need to bring private sector money in off the sidelines and facilitate a real partnership between government money and private sector money. These bills have been led by Senators Warner, Blunt, and Bennet, are genuinely bipartisan, and enjoy support from groups who often don't work well together--from industry to labor, from the AFL-CIO to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.
There are several strong bipartisan bills that show the way forward, but we don't seem to be able to get them to the floor, get them approved, and get them moving forward.
Right now, the truth is that the debate on this floor comes nowhere close to matching the reality of the scope of the problems in front of us. As I mentioned earlier, we have an enormous infrastructure debt. By 2020--in just the next 6 years--it is estimated that our Nation will need $3.6 trillion of new infrastructure investment so we can fix and maintain our roads, bridges, rail, transit, drinking water, ports, sewers, wastewater treatment, and beyond. This is an enormous debt which is unpaid and for which we currently have no path forward.
I know many of us who serve on the Budget Committee and pay attention to the balance sheet of our country are concerned about our structural national debt. I wanted to take a minute today--on a day when everyone in my hometown and home State is concerned about how we will tackle the problem of the I-495 bridge--and remind all of my colleagues of the scale of this national infrastructure debt.
At the heart of this problem and at the heart of so many of the problems we have is our unwillingness to pay for what we want, to pay the bill that is long overdue for our long-overdue improvements to the infrastructure of this great country.
Fixing this problem is going to take a great deal of revenue. We can reform taxes, we can involve the private sector, we can reprioritize funding, and we can reform the way government works. We don't lack for innovative ideas, but at the end of the day what we currently lack is our will.
The people of the United States, through us, need to step up to the challenge of paying the bill. In my hometown, just in the last few hours and over the last few days, we have become more engaged in this debate than we have been in a long time because a bridge that is critical, a vital artery for our community, has stopped. It is closed indefinitely. We need to work together to find the resources to fix this bridge and get America moving together again. It is my hope and plea that my colleagues will step up to this challenge, which I know every community in our country faces.
I thank the Presiding Officer.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Republican whip.
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