WASHINGTON — With two major transportation bills snagged by political clashes on Capitol Hill, Minnesota officials said they aren’t prepared to prognosticate about the future of federal transit funding for the state.
House Republican leadership delayed a vote on its version of the transportation bill this week after lawmakers and interest groups on both sides of the aisle protested to provisions it contained. The $260 billion five-year bill would cut federal transportation funds and cut Minnesota’s share by about $51 million, or about 8 percent, over last year’s funding, according to an analysis from Transportation Weekly. Funding for the state would steadily increase each subsequent year, according to the House Transportation Committee.
The Senate bill has more bipartisan support, but a flurry of amendments has delayed the chamber’s passage of the legislation. The bill would keep federal spending equal to its current levels, plus inflation (two years and $109 billion), and provide up to $26 million in new funds to Minnesota.
Because of the delays in Washington, Minnesota officials are more concerned with the bills’ structure than the amount of money they would end up spending on the state. The Minnesota Department of Transportation wants a long-term bill and one that provides maximum flexibility in allowing states to spend their funds, MnDOT government affairs director Scott Peterson said.
Under any new transportation bill, MnDOT expects to receive funding “in the ballpark” of what it receives right now, Peterson said, which is generally around $600 million, though it varies year to year. The state splits that figure between statewide projects and those chosen by local officials.
Both bills consolidate dozens of federal transportation programs, a move Peterson said would give states more freedom over how to use their funding. It also means the end for several popular programs, such as a transportation enhancement program, that states used to carve out funding for specific projects instead of forcing them to compete with other projects for money.
The state is also anxious to see how Congress plans on funding a mass transit account tucked inside the Highway Trust Fund. The transit account currently receives a portion of the gas tax that fuels the trust fund, but the House bill would stop that system and subject the account to a more complicated appropriations process that doesn’t guarantee such a secure funding allotment each year.
Mass transit advocates are vehemently opposed to the House’s maneuver. The National League of Cities said this week that it’s opposed to the measure, but a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Council, which administers the Twin Cities mass transit system, declined to comment until the bills were finalized. The change “makes no sense,” said Democratic Rep. Tim Walz, a member of the House Transportation Committee.
Both Walz and Republican Rep. Chip Cravaack, another member of the committee, stressed the importance of passing a long-term highway improvement bill, but issues like size, scope and how to pay for it remain largely unresolved, given the upheaval over the House’s bill.
“We’ve got to get a highway bill,” Cravaack said. “We’ve got to get long-term projections. We’ve got to get people back to work, we’ve got to get our bridges and our roads.”
Solving the Trust Fund problem
The increasing difficulty of paying for the Highway Trust Fund is central to the concerns over the funding for the nation’s infrastructure projects, most of which comes from the fund.
An 18.3 percent federal gasoline tax makes up about two-thirds of the trust fund’s roughly $40 billion in revenue each year, but with Americans driving less amid rising fuel prices increases, and with fuel efficiency standards increasing, the tax has become a less robust source of revenue than it has in the past. The Congressional Budget Office expects the fund to go broke sometime in 2013, and the government has already had to come up with several billion in non-gas tax funding for the trust fund every year, including using stimulus money and transfers from the general fund.
Congress has not increased the gas tax since 1993, and there is little political will to do so this session. Instead, the Senate has proposed closing tax loopholes and moving around other federal tax revenues to pay for the trust fund, while House Republicans are attempting to expand oil drilling, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to increase revenue. The plan has, not surprisingly, angered Democrats, and even some Republicans.
Cravaack, meanwhile, postulated that the government could use royalties from oil companies to pay for the trust fund. Walz, for one, said he wasn’t upset by the drilling plan, but he said lawmakers had considered a litany of other revenue plans, including adding a surcharge to transitions on Wall Street, before landing on more oil.
“There was a lot of soul-searching and honest member-to-member work over the years, that we didn’t have things like ANWR because it simply didn’t make enough of the difference for the environmental threat that was there,” Walz said. “It’s the problem we’ve had all year of putting these ideologically unpalatable bills forward … not with any intent of moving it.”
Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry
