Top Senate Democrat Harry Reid vows to keep an clean-car subsidy in the budget, come hell or high water. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP

After midnight last night, the House finally managed to narrowly pass a budget extension bill, but Senate leaders have already rejected it out of hand, since it includes about half the disaster relief they’d like and cuts $1.5 billion from a clean-fuel technology manufacturing program for the auto industry.

The disagreement is strong enough that it threatens to keep Congress in session longer than intended — likely through the weekend, and possibly even into next week’s scheduled recess.

That gives them a week, if necessary, to avert a government shutdown — the potential consequence of inaction on a bill to extend federal government spending past September 30.

Clean vehicles are great, but if Democrats really want to meet important environmental goals, just imagine how much good they could do by spending that $1.5 billion to implement better bus systems or provide emergency assistance to transit agencies struggling to keep up with higher ridership.

In addition to highlighting how Senate Democrats highly prize car subsidies, this situation also puts in perspective the brewing fight over the FY2012 budget. If Congress can’t even pass a simple extension to keep government operations for a few months, with just a few billion dollars’ difference, how will they ever agree to bridge the enormous gap between their visions for FY2012?

Meanwhile, Congress is learning, or perhaps not learning, that they can’t expect to pass clean extensions at the last minute when they can’t agree or aren’t ready to take a pass new legislation in time for the old legislation to expire. Extensions are rarely “clean” anymore, and the new items in them are often cause for rancorous debate.

Lawmakers are still optimistic that they’ll make a deal, and experts caution against too much hysteria over a possible government shutdown, since every budget vote in recent memory has gone down to the wire, and somehow lawmakers always figure something out, usually without missing any of their recess time. In comparison with some of those epic fights, this skirmish over a few billion dollars seems easily solved.

However, it does remind us of a similar situation earlier this year, when the country found itself on the brink of a shutdown. Streetsblog asked transportation agencies and industry officials what a shutdown would mean for them. AASHTO said states wouldn’t be able to get reimbursed for transportation spending, totaling about $100 million a day. An official from Dallas Area Rapid Transit said a shutdown would only present a serious problem if it dragged on for months, but the agency could handle a few weeks without federal reimbursements. Construction industry leaders, already fed up with inaction on Capitol Hill from the two-year delay in passing a new transportation bill, seemed resigned to coping with the problems Washington presents them.

Normal, Illinois' multimodal transportation center, funded with a TIGER grant from the Partnership. Image: Normal, Illinois

Through the partnership, the three agencies have coordinated transportation and land use policy to a greater extent than they did before, helping to curb sprawl and promote smart growth. This partnership has taken the federal agencies out of their “stovepipe” mentality and encouraged efficiency and collaboration at an unprecedented level. Why would lawmakers who want to reduce inefficiencies and waste in the federal government want to cut a program that has been so effective at doing just that?

Last fall, Mariia Zimmerman from HUD told Streetsblog that the Partnership has standardized guidelines to make it easier to apply for grants and eliminated some areas of inefficiency, overlap, and even direct contradiction among the agencies. But perhaps more importantly, she said the Partnership has transformed all of HUD, incorporating a focus on sustainability in all of the agency’s work.

A vote of support from the Senate would mean a lot to the Partnership, which saw its funding stripped in the House proposal for next year’s budget. But the Partnership isn’t the only potential casualty of the House plan: Highway and transit funding each get slashed by 34 percent, TIGER and TIGGER grants are cut entirely, high-speed rail gets nothing, the New Starts transit program gets slashed, and Amtrak is left gasping for air. If the Senate subcommittee doesn’t vote to save funding for these programs tomorrow, they have no chance.

See the Smart Growth America action alert for more information.

Dr. No paints a bullseye on bike/ped funding. Photo: Alex Wong / Getty Images

Now Dr. No has his sights set on bicycle and pedestrian funding.

As calls for a “clean” extension to SAFETEA-LU poured in, Coburn made it clear last week he won’t get with the program. His spokesperson announced that Coburn would try to block the extension if Transportation Enhancements weren’t removed from the bill.

About two percent of the federal transportation budget goes to TE, and of that, 57 percent goes to bike/ped projects, with the rest funding streetscaping, historic preservation and other programs.

The GOP rallying cry against the miniscule amount of money for bicycle and pedestrian improvements is metastasizing. Earlier we reported that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was urging that dedicated funding for Transportation Enhancements be eliminated. And today, Cantor, along with House Speaker John Boehner, sent a letter to President Obama with the same demand:

We are not opposed to initiatives to repair and improve infrastructure, and believe there are reforms that can be implemented that would improve their effectiveness in a manner that supports economic growth. Current law requires that states set-aside 10 percent of their surface transportation funds for transportation enhancements, which must be used for items such as establishment of transportation museums, education activities for pedestrians and bicyclists, acquisition of scenic easements, historic preservation, operation of historic transportation facilities, etc. While many of the initiatives funded by this mandatory set-aside may be worthy projects, eliminating this required set-aside would allow states to devote more money to the types of infrastructure programs you are advocating without adding to the deficit. We believe such a reform would be consistent with your statement last week that we should “reform the way transportation money is invested, to eliminate waste, to give states more control over the projects that are right for them.”

Boehner and Cantor also hoped to find common ground with the president on speeding up reviews of infrastructure projects.

It’s hard to underestimate the damage that this Republican movement against TE can do. It will certainly complicate the passage of an extension of SAFETEA-LU, meaning that Sen. Coburn, and possibly other members of Congress, are declaring their willingness to throw the entire transportation industry, as well as commuters, under the bus while they quibble about the pennies spent on bike paths. According to the White House, if the bill is delayed just 10 days, the country would lose over $1 billion in transportation funding — “money we can never get back.”

How many senators will risk this kind of fallout by standing up for bike/ped funding?

Extensions used to be employed in order to buy more time so that lawmakers could debate policy changes. Now, policy changes are demanded in order to just buy more time. It’s in this frenzied, time-strapped atmosphere that Congress will decide over the next two weeks whether or not to kill federal support for active transportation programs.

One of Chicago's celebrated new bicycling facilities, the Kinzie Street protected bike lane. Will any federal support for bike/ped projects remain after the next transpo bill passes? Photo: Josh Koonce/flickr

The outline confirms that the Senate is working on a two-year bill but does not include the dollar amount. “Consolidation” is the name of the game these days and the Senate plays along, making seven core surface transportation programs into five, including a new Transportation Mobility Program, which “sub-allocates” some funds to metropolitan areas, and a National Freight Program, which proponents of multi-modalism have long pushed for.

It preserves the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program, which has funded some bike and pedestrian projects. Transportation Enhancements, another major way such projects are funded, will probably now be absorbed under CMAQ. It’s unclear whether the Recreational Trails program would move to CMAQ as well. But there are no explicit guarantees to actually set aside funds for these bike-ped programs, and how funding levels will shake out in the final analysis is anybody’s guess.

Like the House, the Senate bill offers states “the flexibility to fund these activities as they see fit” – which amounts to a revocation of the federal commitment to funding this work. Many states, absent a federal mandate, will spend virtually nothing on bike/ped infrastructure.

Bicycling advocates had asked for dedicated funding that doesn’t pit them against road projects, the same funding proportion as they had in SAFETEA-LU, and changes to Safe Routes to School. None of those features appear to be in this bill.

“It’s hard to know without seeing the details, but at first blush it doesn’t look good for bike and pedestrian issues,” said Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists. “Perhaps it’s to be expected that there’s nothing upfront in the language about protecting dedicated funding, given that it was a topic of some contention among the protagonists. But it’s pretty troubling to see no reference to any of the issues that affect cyclists and pedestrians – nothing about complete streets, nothing about dedicated funding.”

The Senate bill expands and modifies the TIFIA loan program, as does the House bill, and does not mention an infrastructure bank. Boxer indicated in the fall that she was more friendly to an expansion of TIFIA than to a new entity, though more recently she has said that she supported the inclusion of an infrastructure bank in the bill.

On performance outcomes, the outline says:

MAP-21 focuses the highway program on key outcomes, such as reducing fatalities, improving bridges, fixing roads, and reducing congestion, in order to ensure that taxpayers are receiving the most for their money. States will set their own targets for improving safety, road and bridge condition, congestion, and freight movement.

Probably one of the greatest disappointments in the bill – or at least this outline – is the omission of emissions reductions as one of those performance goals. To set that as a national priority would elevate the importance of transit and active transportation programs. The emphasis here rests squarely with roads.

“Improving bridges” and “fixing roads” don’t really sound like performance outcomes, and bicycling advocates fear that, while safety is an essential goal, the fact that there are about 60 times more car fatalities per year than bike fatalities will translate into a far greater focus on car safety than bicycle safety.

By contrast, the Bipartisan Policy Center has suggested setting national transportation goals such as economic growth, metropolitan accessibility, energy security and environmental protection.

The bill does seek to improve state and metro planning processes “to incorporate a more comprehensive performance-based approach to decision making.”

The Banking Committee has not yet inserted its transit language, nor has the Commerce Committee come forward with its rail language, so this outline doesn’t say anything about those elements.

We understand that the full bill has not even been circulated to Democratic committee members yet, indicating that, despite the false hopes of last week, a formal bill introduction is not yet on the horizon. The committee is holding a hearing this Thursday on “issues” for the reauthorization – a very general topic that would indicate that committee members are still gathering input, not debating an actual bill.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) led 24 other senators in urging "strengthened" funding for transit. Photo: Examiner

The letter notes that public transportation systems find themselves in a budgetary crisis just as more and more people, driven by $4/gallon gas, are seeking out transportation options.

During the worst economic downturn in recent memory, we must identify new approaches for funding infrastructure projects. A truly long-term and prudent vision for a future transportation network will strengthen the role of public transportation in growing our communities and ensure that new funding strategies do not favor highway spending to the detriment of public transportation spending.

Americans want and deserve transportation options that reflect community priorities and values. At a time when deficit reduction is attracting the full focus of the Congress, we implore the Committee to strengthen the Mass Transit Account’s fair share of funding in the next surface transportation authorization to guarantee that our economic recovery continues and that we can be more self-reliant in meeting our transportation needs.

The letter doesn’t specifically ask for a larger share of surface transportation dollars than the 20 percent mass transit historically is allotted, but they do ask for transit’s share to be strengthened. Apparently, given the challenges implicit in getting 25 senators to agree on anything, that vague language was as specific as they could get.

In a statement on the letter, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chair of the Senate Banking subcommittee with jurisdiction over public transportation, pointed out the need for new transportation revenues — and the fact that the House is going in the opposite direction.

Congress is currently working on reauthorizing the surface transportation bill, which expires on September 30. If spending continues at current levels, the highway account could run out of money next year and the transit account shortly thereafter. The Senate Finance Committee is responsible for funding these accounts. The House of Representatives is currently developing a transportation bill that follows the Ryan Budget’s direction to cut surface transportation funding by 31 percent.

A list of senators signing on to the letter is after the jump.

• Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
• Dick Durbin (D-IL)
• Charles Schumer (D-NY)
• Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
• Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ)
• Tom Carper (D-DE)
• Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
• Ron Wyden (D-OR)
• Ben Cardin (D-MD)
• Robert Casey (D-PA)
• Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
• Jack Reed (D-RI)
• Michael Bennet (D-CO)
• Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
• Daniel Akaka (D-HI)
• Patty Murray (D-WA)
• Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)
• Joe Lieberman (I-CT)
• Tom Udall (D-NM)
• John Kerry (D-MA)
• Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)
• Chris Coons (D-DE)
• Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
• Jim Webb (D-VA)
• Mark Warner (D-VA)

U.S. DOT's Roy Kienitz said that in some cases, federal funding should support reconstructing bridges to work for more than just cars. Concept for bike-ped path on Cleveland's Innerbelt Crossing: GreenCityBlueLake.

In a meeting with transportation reform advocates last week, Secretary Ray LaHood indicated that the administration’s proposal will drop early next year. Today Kienitz tipped his hat to the reform community in describing the goals the administration has in mind:

The first thing you have to do is name your goals if you want to make sure you’re pursuing them… Our strategic goals are pretty simple: economic competitiveness, safety, state of good repair of the existing system, environmental sustainability, and community livability.

Today’s hearing was about financing, however, and Kienitz acknowledged that the path toward those lofty goals is a little complicated. But he did give some hints about what the administration’s thinking. He said U.S. DOT is trying to foster a financing system that does a better job of matching the project to the need:

Some places they propose a transit investment, in some places we have to rebuild the bridges that already exist but configure it differently, whether it’s for bicycles, pedestrians, cars, or transit. Other places we need to invest in highway capacity – but that should be case by case. [emphasis added]

Kienitz also stood up for allocating funds without the constraint of formulas based on different modes of travel: “Right now… a highway dollar is only a highway dollar, and a transit dollar is only a transit dollar.” He said a project like Los Angeles’ ambitious transit expansion requires more money with more flexibility.

So he’s beating the drum for higher funding levels, and for finding a way to pay for it, and for doing it soon. “Given the economic situation right now,” he said, “it seems appropriate to frontload a significant share of that money, and we have suggested the first $50 billion to be made available as soon as possible.”

But “as soon as possible” looks to be at least four months away. Congress is already itching to get out of town, and leadership could adjourn the session as soon as tomorrow night. A lame-duck session after the election will deal with tax cut extensions and some other urgent matters. Big new initiatives like these will have to wait until the new Congress gets sworn in — one that will have a much different look if Republicans make the gains they’re hoping to make.

Senator Barbara Boxer, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, US DOT Secretary Ray Lahood, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Transbay Joint Powers Authority Board Chairman and SFMTA CEO Nat Ford at the Transbay Transit Center groundbreaking. Photos: Matthew Roth.

Though most of the California political class celebrated the groundbreaking of the new Transbay Transit Center with U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood in San Francisco yesterday, significant questions remain for funding a national high-speed rail network through the federal transportation act.

The event swarmed with Secret Service and various other branches of law enforcement keeping an eye on a crowd that, as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom joked with LaHood, was mostly made up of consultants on the Transbay project.

LaHood cracked wise several times at Newsom's expense, repeating more comments Newsom made before the press conference to the public and the media and suggesting Californian's should vote him in as Lt. Governor on his humor alone.

When he stopped ribbing Newsom, LaHood gushed about how far "ahead of the curve" California is on high-speed rail. LaHood said U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) had cast "courageous votes" that made the stimulus bill possible, which meant a $48 billion infusion for the US DOT or nearly two-thirds his annual budget. From the $8 billion President Barack Obama added for high-speed rail nationally, California received $2.3 billion, $400 million of that for the Transbay Transit Center.

"People who come back from Europe or Asia and have ridden high-speed rail, like many of you have, come back to America and ask why we don't have high-speed rail in America? Because we've never made the investment, that's why," said LaHood. "This year we had 8 billion times more money for high-speed rail given President Obama's vision to connect America with high-speed, inter-city rail."

LaHood also pointed to California's competitive advantage in federal money for high speed rail because the state has "its act together and you want high-speed rail, you've been working on it for a decade."

"The people deserve a lot of credit, to go to the polls, and to cast votes to raise taxes in order to develop the kind of infrastructure for high-speed rail, the people deserve a lot of credit."

While ribbon cutting on such a monumental project made for good photos and sound bites, long-term funding for high-speed rail nationally and in California is not a sure thing. Despite the $8 billion last year and another $2.5 billion this year, the U.S. lags far behind China, which is investing nearly $300 billion over the next decade on its high-speed rail network. What's more, states sought seven times more funding for rail than the stimulus gave out and demand is only growing.

When asked if the Senate will take up the re-authorization of the national transportation act, Senator Boxer told Streetsblog after the Transbay event she hoped to have a bill out of her Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and to the Senate floor this year. "I think we have a very good chance but I can't say for sure," she said.

When asked if her bill would mirror House Transportation Committee Chair James Oberstar's (D-MN) commitment to increase transit funding, Boxer said, "I would hope so. I would hope we will be able to do that."

When asked whether she thought she could convince Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking minority leader on her committee and an opponent of linking climate and transportation policies, to support money for high-speed rail or at least stay out of her way, she said, "I don't know how he feels on high-speed rail," but that it was "not necessarily a problem."

Senator Boxer elaborating on the climate and transportation bills.

Boxer also noted that with a comprehensive energy bill unlikely in the near term, she and her colleagues were looking for numerous other options to "put a price on carbon," whether by making sure the Environmental Protection Agency was vigilant in regulating carbon emissions or by supporting states' efforts to limit climate change, such as the Western Climate Initiative.

"If we can't convince our colleagues that this is serious, we're going to do absolutely everything we can absent comprehensive legislation," she said.

While the federal agenda was important to her, Boxer indicated she was concerned with a local battle now brewing: California's Proposition 23, which would suspend the landmark AB 32 climate change law. "The other thing I have to do is just make sure California can move forward and that there's no preemption of what we're doing. Right now I'm fighting to defeat Prop 23, which would be a disaster," she said.

Given recent polling that shows Boxer losing ground to her Republican Senate challenger, Carly Fiorina, transportation advocates nationally should be concerned. If she were to lose her seat to Fiorina and the EPW committee were to be shaken up, a transportation act with significant funding for transit and high-speed rail would be more precarious.

Containers at the Port of Oakland. Photo: NOAA

The freight sector is lumbering under inefficient and outdated systems that cause pollution, public health problems, safety hazards, and delivery delays. There’s never been a coordinated national approach to solving these problems. And with no deliberate strategy, the default approach is often to build more highways.

As Stephen Davis of Transportation for America writes:

If a port is congested or wants to expand, there’s little available federal money to spend directly on rail or any other mode. Your choices are highways or highways. When a state or port does spend to improve operations, there is no accountability to make sure they’re actually reducing port/freight congestion, moving freight faster, or reducing air pollution in surrounding communities.

Enter the FREIGHT Act. (That’s the Focusing Resources, Economic Investment and Guidance to Help Transportation Act of 2010, with true Capitol Hill acronym panache.) The FREIGHT Act was introduced in the Senate toward the end of July and in the House a week later.

The bill focuses on areas known as "connectors," said Kathryn Phillips of the Environmental Defense Fund. “All the literature and studies say it’s the connector areas, the hubs, where you have the most congestion and environmental impacts.” The bill calls for troubleshooting at these bottlenecks, where products are transferred “from boat to truck to another truck to rail” and everything gets bogged down. Trucks get stuck in traffic; trains sit on the tracks; ships idle at port.

Communities near international ports pay the price. In Riverside, California, traffic gets tied up at 26 at-grade rail crossings 128 times a day when trains pass. Add to that the noise and pollution nearby neighborhoods must contend with.

“We don’t just want to pay for asthma filters for schools,” said Isaac Kos-Read of the Port of Los Angeles. “We want to fix the emissions problem from the ground up.”

Meanwhile, the bridges near the Port of LA are in alarming condition. The Schuyler Heim Bridge is expected to fail in the next major earthquake. The Gerald Desmond Bridge -- which carries 15-25 percent of all cargo containers coming into country, according to Kos-Read -- wears a “diaper” to catch chunks of falling concrete.

The Port of Oakland is struggling with antiquated rail lines over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, said port spokesperson Matt Davis. “Some of the tunnel clearances are not high enough to accept double-stacked containers,” he said. State assistance to fix the problem didn’t come through. Davis is convinced a national approach is needed to address problems like these.

“We’ve seen previous projects of national and regional significance end up in the earmark process, and what you get is some random highway in Ohio,” said Davis. “It’s a hopscotch approach, not looking at it as one coordinated freight corridor.”

Kos-Read agrees. He added that Canada is giving the U.S. an added incentive to pull together to improve the freight sector -- or else “Canada is going to eat our lunch.” Canada has articulated a national freight plan -- and it's marketing itself to Asia as the gateway to “North America’s economic heartland.”

The FREIGHT Act would mandate the creation of a National Freight Transportation Strategic Plan, as well as a permanent Office of Freight Planning and Development within the U.S. Department of Transportation. It would also start a grant program to focus funds where they’re most needed.

The legislation seeks not just to improve efficiency, but also to reduce “air, water, and noise pollution and impacts on ecosystems and communities.” It sets goals for improved outcomes, like improving travel time reliability, cutting 40 percent of carbon emissions, and reducing freight transportation-related fatalities by 10 percent.

How those outcomes are achieved will be up to the new office and the strategic planners to figure out. It stands to reason that some trucking will be replaced with rail, or short-sea shipping, but none of that is prescribed in the bill.

Don’t expect this legislation to follow the normal process of How-a-Bill-Becomes-a-Law. Its introduction in the House is, in part, a product of the slow pace of the massive transportation re-authorization bill, which seems to be proceeding on a glacial time scale. While it stalls, lawmakers are picking off pieces of it to work on.

But Transportation Committee Chair Jim Oberstar (D-MN) is “not fond of doing things piecemeal,” according to committee staffer Jim Berard. “He feels the authorization bill should be a comprehensive approach to surface transportation issues.” So the FREIGHT Act, in the House, is likely to be folded into the larger transportation legislation, and not passed as a stand-alone bill.

It works a little differently in the Senate. The Commerce Committee will take up the FREIGHT Act, while the Environment and Public Works Committee takes up the highways portion of the re-authorization, and other committees bite off their pieces of the transportation pie. Those various committee measures will then form the Senate’s transportation proposal.

However it gets done, port operators, environmental justice advocates, and supporters of transportation reform agree that it needs to get done.

Shaun
Donovan, Ray LaHood, Lisa Jackson: Together forever? The Livable
Communities Act would codify the partnership between HUD, US DOT, and
the EPA. Photo: EPA

The administration has been taking steps since last March to coordinate between the Department of Transportation, HUD, and the EPA. This bill, carried in the Senate by Connecticut’s Chris Dodd, would formalize those partnerships and authorize substantially more funding to work with. 

Most of the action would flow through HUD. This year the agency is funding $150 million in grants
supporting regional efforts to improve access to transit and promote
walkable development. The Livable Communities Act promises to scale up
that program significantly, creating a new office within HUD, called the
Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, that will distribute
about $4 billion through competitive grants.

The initial round of grants would fund comprehensive plans — local
initiatives to shape growth by coordinating housing, transportation,
and economic development policies. Most of the funding — $3.75 billion
– would be distributed over three years to implement projects
identified in such plans.

While some Senators from rural states had expressed skepticism
about the benefits of the bill for their constituents, yesterday’s vote
split strictly along party lines, with Democrats Jon Tester of Montana
and Tim Johnson of South Dakota both voting in favor.

To make the case for the bill to his rural and Republican counterparts, Dodd singled out Envision Utah,
a campaign that has built public support for smart growth policies in
one of the country’s reddest states. Not a single GOP Senator voted for
the bill, however, even Utah’s Bob Bennett, who told UPI, "I think the overall philosophy is wise, but I will be voting against it."

Some of the strongest backing for the bill has come from AARP,
which sent a letter to committee members on Monday pointing out that the
country’s aging population will be poorly served if development
patterns don’t evolve to make driving less necessary. "Nine out of ten
of our members tell us they want to stay in their own
homes as they age — most are living in suburban or rural areas and
don’t have access to public transportation," said Debra Alvarez, senior
legislative representative for AARP. "There’s a lot of things that can
be done in small towns: co-locating
things like post offices, grocery stores, pharmacies, and putting
housing there too."

Advocates for transportation reform are now looking at the path
forward for the bill. "We applaud the Committee for taking this major
step forward on behalf of communities both small and large, and for
American families looking for affordable homes in healthy neighborhoods
with reliable transportation options," said Transportation for America
director James Corless in a statement. "We urge the full Senate to
follow their lead and give final passage."

Dodd has vowed to shepherd the Livable Communities Act through to become law
before he retires in January. With Congress about to adjourn until
September 13, he’ll face a tight time frame. In addition to awaiting a
vote in the full Senate, the bill has yet to clear a committee vote in the House, where Colorado representative Ed Perlmutter is the sponsor.

With those seven words last Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dashed hopes for a comprehensive climate bill. Prospects also dimmed for a transportation component in the final energy legislation that emerges from the Senate. Reid is expected to announce that plan later today.

Harry Reid indicated last week that he won't address the nation's oil-dependent transportation system in legislation expected to be unveiled today. Photo: atwatervillage/Flickr

Instead, Reid indicated that his bill will likely contain language dealing only with the Gulf oil spill and some energy efficiency provisions.

"The package that Reid announced [Thursday] doesn’t address climate change at all,” said Colin Peppard, deputy director of federal transportation policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "What we were hearing from staff on the Senate side is that basically up until pretty close to Reid’s announcement, there was still consideration for pieces of the Merkley bill."

Reid’s announcement “took the entire environmental community off-guard,” said Stephanie Potts, a policy analyst with Smart Growth America.

While the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe became an emblem of the need to wean the nation off oil, it did not stiffen many spines in Congress. In fact, said Potts, the Gulf spill may have worked against a broader climate bill by narrowing the avenues for compromise and horsetrading. Without expanded offshore drilling as a bargaining chit, there were few lures to win the votes of some recalcitrant Senators, especially those from coastal states.

In the end, the globs of brown in the Gulf of Mexico didn't overcome the absence of will to raise revenues. "The biggest obstacle is lack of funding," said one source close to the legislation, who said some transportation component may still surface in the final bill. "[Reid's bill] has not been released. There are opportunities to effect influence on that legislation, that bill, via amendments."

The source said that as a standalone measure, however, the Merkley bill is a “very difficult prospect.”

Some advocates also described the climate bill as a casualty of the Obama administration's decision to focus first on health care legislation and then the recently-passed financial reform bill. “I think it’s been a timing issue in large part," said Matt Mayrl, policy director for the California-based Apollo Alliance, which works toward “a green energy revolution.” “In terms of oxygen the Senate has to operate, the time is not there.”

There are still opportunities to reform U.S. transportation policy this year. Potts pointed to a lame duck period in late fall and early winter as the next best opportunity to push through another version of Carper or Merkley’s bills. She also said it is important to continue to explain the benefits of transportation reform.

“We’re trying to work with Congress to educate them on how smart growth works around communities,” Potts said. “It’s not all transit... it really works in communities of all sizes.”

And components of the Merkley bill will re-surface in the fight to encourage alternative energy use and more transit options. “We think that the Merkley bill is great place to start,” Peppard said. "We are working with the House and Senate this year into next year and we are making a big push to build support for those initiatives."

For now, all eyes are on the bill that Reid will introduce later today. Despite the seeming finality of last week’s announcement, there is still a chance some components of the Merkley bill will be included. One source close to the legislation said simply, “All hope is not lost.”

Many of the home finance industry's unethical practices were mirrored by the nation's auto dealers, but the regulatory response has left the car loan market untouched.

More egregiously, their business innovations -- not advertised as such, of course -- include such activities as “power-booking” (reporting to lenders that a car is equipped with non-existent options, thereby raising the amount of the loan) and “yo-yo financing” (a form of bait and switch, in which car buyers leave a down payment or trade in their car, drive off the lot, and then are falsely told that the financing "fell through" and that they have to pay a higher interest rate, often under threat of repossession or arrest).

The list goes on. Dealers regularly get kickbacks and markups from other lenders. Car loans have been packaged and dangerously securitized, just like home mortgages. Dealers encouraged many car buyers to use home equity loans to make their purchases, obliterating whatever cushion they had when home prices plummeted. It’s a jungle on the lot for consumers, especially the poor and those with poor credit.

In a recent New Yorker article, James Surowiecki seeks to explain how the auto dealer exemption could have happened when it is so opposed to the public interest, and when powerful actors like Citibank and J. P. Morgan did not escape regulation. He sees it as mostly a public relations coup, with the dealers presenting themselves as Main Street plain folks, virtually victims of the financial system themselves. They also played up the number of jobs dealerships provide in communities across the nation (how those jobs would dry up if dealers had to make an honest living was not made clear).

But what wasn’t noted is the power of the car dealers over the press itself.

The auto industry is the single largest advertiser in America’s newspapers, magazines, and television stations. It is the economic backbone of those media, and this helps explain the minimalist coverage, and the general lack of backbone in coverage, of this issue as the bill worked its way through Congress. Over the past several months, the loophole opened, then seemed to close, and then opened again. The media could have been educating the public on what the automotive loophole will cost them, day in and day out. Instead, they kept their focus on other sources and forms of lending abuses.

And when dealers are called “small businesspeople,” that may suggest they are in the same boat with the local embroidery shop owner or restaurateur, but dealers are often the largest business in a community, and many are part of large chains, like AutoNation. The auto dealer is a little guy like the beachfront mansions of Long Island are cottages, but PR-produced confusion has worked to the dealers’ advantage.

It isn’t just the financial reform bill that has left the real little guy, the car buyer, exposed to the avarice of auto dealers. Americans are at risk of ending up indentured to their car purchases because they can't escape from the car system itself. While the car is often presented as a vehicle of opportunity, getting people to work and new life chances, in reality it locks people into a costly lifestyle, creating more inequality in America than almost anything else besides access to quality education. While that’s a topic for another post, it is a key reason why transit and bikeable, walkable communities are so desperately needed -- to create a loophole car dealers can’t drive through.

Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist at the Watson Institute at Brown University, and Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former marketer and banker, are the authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan).

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris
Dodd (D-CT) (Photo: The
Washington Note)

The Livable Communities Act would
provide
about $4 billion in competitive grants to coordinate housing,
transportation, and economic development policy with an eye toward
promoting sustainable development. About $400 million would be slated
for planning with the remainder funding implementation. The bill would
also create a new office within the Department of Housing and Urban
Development to guide and administer the programs. If passed, it would
strengthen the Obama administration’s multi-agency Sustainable
Communities effort. 

At today’s committee hearing representatives of the National League
of Cities, the National Association of Counties, the National
Association of Development Organizations, and the National Association
of Regional Councils each strongly endorsed the goals of the bill. 

Witnesses drew on professional experience — from trying to
revitalize barren neighborhoods in Indianapolis to managing the growth
of a rural Maryland county — to explain how federal policy could spur
better development where they live. The Hartford region, for example, is
investing in a new bus rapid transit line, said Lyle Wray, the
executive director for the region’s Council of Governments, but they
haven’t been able to tie the transit project to broader goals. "Linking
that opportunity to affordable housing, jobs, and sustainability is what
the Livable Communities Act would allow us to do," he said.

Describing the bill today, Dodd stressed that integrated
transportation and land use planning can help address a host of
challenges: high foreclosure rates, climate change and oil dependency,
deteriorating infrastructure, traffic congestion, and the loss of
farmland. Those problems, Dodd argued, aren’t urban or rural. "One
community can use the grants to develop brownfields in a post-industrial
area," he said, and "another might create a livable town center or main
street." 

Even so, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), expressed doubt about whether
his rural state would benefit under Dodd’s legislation.

After acknowledging that sprawl is a problem, lamenting that in
Montana housing has replaced some of the best farmland, Tester pressed
the witness panel to explain how the Livable Communities Act would work
for a town like his, with only 700 people. The two representatives of
rural areas on the panel each suggested some sort of funding set-aside
for rural communities, an idea which seemed to intrigue Tester.

Two other senators spoke who are not already sponsors of the bill.
Sherrod Brown (D-OH) primarily discussed his own legislation
specifically tailored to shrinking industrial cities, of which there are
many in Ohio, but seemed supportive of Dodd’s legislation. Mark Warner
(D-VA) told the committee that he supports the goals of the Livable
Communities Act, but would like to make sure that the bill is rigorously
defined. "Is it just squishy livability?" he asked. "Is there a way
that we can define this with metrics?" Witnesses assured him that
results like the volume of reduced greenhouse gases, acres of preserved
open space, and rises in property values can be measured.

No Republican Senators attended the meeting.

Rev. Jesse Jackson, second from left,
has joined transit workers’ unions in their Save Our Ride campaign.
(Photo: Streetsblog
NYC)

"Unless the U.S. Senate passes" the transit
operating legislation, the union’s Mike Hall wrote in a Friday
blog post, "working families who count on public transportation
systems in
communities across the country will face even more severe fare
increases and service cuts and transit workers are looking at further
layoffs."

The president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department, Ed
Wytkind, also pushed for passage of the Senate bill in a National
Journal guest
blog post this morning. The Amalgamated Transit Union and the
Transport Workers Union, both AFL-CIO members, have aligned with Rev.
Jesse Jackson, environmental groups, and civil-rights advocates for a
campaign dubbed Save Our Ride that
seeks to stave off sweeping transit cuts in major cities.

The unions have several hurdles to clear before the transit funding
becomes available, however. The Senate legislation contains only
authorizing language, meaning that lawmakers must quickly follow with
"appropriating" language that technically disburses the operating money.

That two-step process would have been accomplished quickly by
attaching the transit aid to a larger bill that is considered
"must-pass" by Congress, such as the upcoming supplemental funding bill
for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Republican senators vowed
early on to oppose any attempt to add unrelated spending to that
measure, and the Senate passed
its version sans transit aid before adjourning for the Memorial Day
recess.

That leaves room for the AFL-CIO to generate momentum for another
vehicle to carry the transit funding — but given the resistance among
both House and Senate Democrats to any new spending not offset by cuts
elsewhere in the budget, the union may face an uphill battle this
summer.

Does the
Senate climate bill include a user fee? That depends on how the term is
defined. (Photo: Pop
and Politics)

The central complaint raised by
mainstream transport players boils down to, as American Association of
State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) executive director
John Horsley put it in
a statement, the Senate bill’s "preemption" of user-fee revenue
that historically has gone into the nation’s dwindling highway trust
fund.

"Congress can ill-afford to consider any legislation that" siphons
off money from the trust fund, which has required more than $30 billion
in replenishment from the general Treasury over the past 18 months,
Horsley said.

Stephen Sandherr, chief of the Associated General Contractors — a
backer of the
Senate effort to bar the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from
regulating greenhouse gas emissions in the absence of congressional
action — echoed that sentiment in his
own statement on the upper-chamber climate proposal.

"[B]y taking funds raised through the proposal’s new transportation
fees
and committing all but a small percentage to unrelated spending, the
legislation leaves our aging and inefficient roads, airways and transit
systems vastly underfunded," Sandherr said.

But does the Senate climate bill impose a user fee on
transportation fuel consumers? The text of the measure specifically
requires "each refined [fuel] product provider" to purchase emissions
permits from the EPA on a quarterly basis at a fixed price, with no
permit trading allowed. Horsley’s depiction of those charges as a "user
fee" relies on the considerable likelihood that oil companies and
refiners would pass on the cost of those emissions permits to consumers
in the form of higher gas prices.

In the meantime, how much of the revenue raised by the bill’s new
fuel permits would infrastructure receive?

The American Road and Transportation Builders Association estimated
last week that the Senate plan would raise $20 billion from the new
charges on oil producers and refiners, with about $6.25 billion of that
divided into equal parts — one-third for the highway trust fund,
one-third for competitive federal grants similar to the TIGER
program, and one-third for local land use projects, in the style of
the so-called "CLEAN
TEA" proposal.

Sen. Patty
Murray (D-WA), center, talks to Transport Secretary Ray LaHood, at left.
(Photo: WS DOT via Flickr)

Sen.
Patty Murray (D-WA), chairman of the upper chamber’s transportation
spending panel, praised the mission of the sustainability office but
told LaHood she has "concerns about" the Obama administration’s pitch to
send $200 million in Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) funding to
the effort next year.

"I also have questions about how these proposals from [U.S.] DOT
fit into our
larger debate over" paying for the next long-term federal
transportation bill, Murray said.

Murray’s measured assessment of the new alliance between LaHood,
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan, and the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) focused on how federal officials
would define the concept of "sustainability" as they determined how to
dole out grants to local development plans.

But her Republican counterpart on the spending panel, Sen. Kit Bond
(MO), took a harder line in challenging LaHood on the administration’s
ability to positively influence on-the-ground urban and rural planning.

"I’m not as confident [as others] that trusting federal
decision-makers in Washington to lead the process, to tell communities
how they should grow, is the right way to go," Bond said, tangling with
LaHood as he aligned with a road construction industry group that
criticized the administration’s sustainability budget.

Sending that $200 million from highways — about one-two-hundredth
of the FHWA’s annual budget — to the sustainable communities office
"may reflect a view that we want to get rid of auto transportation,"
Bond said.

"The idea we’re giving up on [roads] or don’t care about the
highways is nonsense," LaHood shot back. "People want other
alternatives. We have a state-of-the-art interstate system. If people
need more capacity, they can tell us that."

Bond’s reply was equally charged: "I’m telling you that."

Murray and Bond’s panel is charged with translating the White House
budget request into annual spending legislation for the U.S. DOT and
HUD. Congress ultimately
approved the administration’s proposed $150 million in
sustainability grants last year, but this year’s higher funding pitch
could face a tougher path to passage amid the lack of progress on a new
six-year federal transport bill.

Still, that continued reliance on extensions of existing
transportation law — which have necessitated a transfer of more than
$30 billion from the general Treasury to the highway trust fund since
2008 — gave LaHood ammunition against Bond and Murray’s complaint that
road users would be ceding that $200 million in highway money to the
sustainability office.

When lawmakers pay for transport programs from the general
Treasury, LaHood said, "part of that money comes … from all
the taxpayers — who, in some instances, want something other than
roads. I have to put that on the record."

The several dozen transportation industry groups that raised
questions about where the upcoming Senate climate change bill would
send proceeds from its new "linked fee" on carbon fuels can stop
worrying — because it looks like the legislation won’t contain any new
tax on motor fuels.

Sen. John
Kerry (D-MA) (Photo: Getty)

As Sen. John Kerry (MA), the climate bill’s chief Democratic
author, told
Reuters late yesterday:

"There is not even a linked fee. There’s not a tax,
there’s nothing similar."

Pressed
for clarification about the fee, Kerry then said, "certainly not the
way it was described previously, nothing like that." The Massachusetts
Democrat refused to elaborate.

Kerry was more direct in a response to the
Houston Chronicle, stating: “The gas tax is 18.4 cents today, and
it’ll be that when this bill is passed.”  

His comments do not rule out the possibility of some charge on
carbon-based fuels remaining in the bill, but they cast significant
doubt on the scenario that Washington transportation watchers had feared
most: extra fees that oil companies would pass on through higher costs
at the pump, amounting to a de facto gas tax hike without guaranteed
revenue for road and transit projects.

The oil and gas industry had responded favorably to the prospect of
a predictable fee they could market as a response to climate change,
effectively shifting any negative consumer response onto Congress rather
than fuel producers. American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard
predicted
last month that a carbon charge would "soften the reaction" among
his member firms to a national cap on greenhouse gases.

The challenge of addressing transportation emissions, which account
for about one-third of the nation’s total output, could end up pushing
the release of the Senate climate bill beyond its original Monday
deadline. Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC), the measure’s sole GOP backer so
far, told
CongressDaily that Monday remains "the hope" but is not set in
stone.

Sen.
Lindsey Graham (R-SC) joined the White House in denying that his
forthcoming climate bill would feature a "gas tax." (Photo: MSNBC)

But
it looks like there’s no need to worry. The Obama administration
yesterday gave a statement to the Wall
Street Journal that sought to lock down any attempt to associate
the Senate climate plan with higher fuel charges: “The Senators don’t
support a gas tax, and neither does the White House."

A spokesman for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the climate proposal’s
sole GOP sponsor, also denied that the bill would include a gas tax. The
bulk of the back-and-forth is a semantic battle that reflects how
politically poisonous a gas tax increase remains for both parties in
Washington.

But it may also suggest that Graham and his co-authors are moving
away from the carbon fee they had originally conceived. Graham described
the idea to
The Hill last month as "an assessment on what they do in the carbon
world. They are creating a carbon product, they are going to pay a
fee." The cost of such a fee, he added at the time, would be partially
passed on to customers at the pump.

On the whole, the fact that the White House is already denying the
existence of a gas tax more than a week before the climate bill is set
to emerge may not bode well for its future (not to mention that of the still-stalled
six-year transportation legislation).

"So Much For Kerry-Graham-Lieberman Global Warming Gas Tax?" the
press office of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) tweeted.

Even as the Obama administration ramps up its work on a sustainability initiative that treats transportation, housing, and energy efficiency as interconnected aspects of development policy, the effort remains without an official congressional authorization — a situation that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) vowed to fix yesterday.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) (Photo: The Washington Note)

During an appearance in his home state with Ron Sims, chief of the administration’s inter-agency Office of Livable Communities, Dodd vowed to work for passage of his legislation authorizing $4 billion in grants for Sims’ work.

"I only have about eight to 10 months," he said, according to the Hartford Courant. "My goal is to see the Livable Communities Act become law before I retire."

Dodd, whose panel has jurisdiction over housing and urban development, is working with that 10-month deadline as he anticipates retiring from Congress at year’s end. His push to create a long-term foundation for the administration’s sustainability effort also could run into resistance from rural lawmakers whose states have tended to benefit from a transportation spending system based on road-mile formulas.

The first stirrings of rural skepticism came on Thursday, when Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) questioned the administration’s move to emphasize "multi-modal" transport projects that would combine roads, transit, and bike-ped access.

Begich asked the U.S. DOT’s No. 2, John Porcari, to make sure that rural states are "not lost in the mix." That sentiment was echoed later in the day by Sen. John Thune (R-SD).

"It seems to me that [the Office of Livable Communities] is a program that’s going to overwhelmingly focus on urban areas," Thune told Porcari during the latter’s appearance before the Senate Commerce Committee, asking if rural states such as his own would "get some assurance or guarantee of funding."

Porcari assured the senators that the administration plans to include rural areas in its sustainability plans, describing the program as an opportunity to restore the "quality of life" once associated with small-town America. Nonetheless, the concerns raised by Begich and Thune could signal more requests for livable communities grants to be distributed among all states, as opposed to the more competitive process the administration has outlined for its first $150 million of funding.

The most significant test of Dodd’s ability to marshal support for his bill authorizing the livable communities office may come later this spring, as lawmakers consider the administration’s request for about $530 million in 2011 funding for the effort. Congress assented to the White House budget request for $150 million in sustainability grants for 2010.

Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) (Photo: Politico)

But
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s visit with Senate appropriators
today was anything but humdrum, as Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) challenged him
repeatedly to defend the White House’s efforts on sustainable
development and high-speed rail.

Bond cited a recent Wall Street Journal editorial by Wendell Cox, a conservative pundit who has penned laudatory literature for road lobbying groups, in accusing the Obama administration of frittering away taxpayers’ money on high-speed rail.

LaHood fired back, remarking wryly that Bond’s home state sought high-speed rail grants and publicly celebrated
its $31 million haul. "I got calls on this every day from senators and
governors" clamoring for an opportunity to build inter-city passenger
rail, LaHood said.

Answering Bond’s charge that the rail
funding process was less than transparent, the U.S. DOT chief threw in
a bold claim: "I don’t know of one lobbyist that darkened
our door with an application … that came to our door with the idea they
were going
to have some edge."

A November investigation
by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity found that more than 50
government entities and private companies have hired high-speed rail
lobbyists, including the AFL-CIO, the Mayo Clinic, and overseas train
manufacturers such as Siemens and Bombardier.

The sharpest
exchange between Bond and LaHood came on the topic of walkable local
development, which the U.S. DOT has worked to promote through $150 million in 2010 grants and an inter-agency partnership with housing and environmental protection officials.

"What
is livability?" Bond asked LaHood, minutes after comparing the task of
defining the term to defining pornography. (The origins of that
reference are explained here.)

"Communities where people have access to many different forms
of transportation, and affordable housing … maybe they don’t want a car, so they can
walk to work or take mass transit to work," LaHood said, using the newly built-up neighborhood surrounding his office as an example.

Bond’s reply summed up the challenge of crafting new federal transportation policy in an era marked by rural-urban-suburban culture clashes. "I’ve got a lot of constituents for whom
livability means having a decent highway," he said. "They’ve got to drive between one town and
another town."

LaHood
gamely tried to put Bond’s criticism in perspective, noting that
highways received the lion’s share — $27 billion — of the
transportation funding in last year’s economic stimulus law.

Yet
Bond only dug in his heels, arguing that Americans had shown their
eagerness to use roads and bridges but would not embrace rail or
walkable infrastructure. "When did it become the responsibility of the
federal DOT to
build sidewalks?" the soon-to-retire senator asked, before LaHood that reminded him Congress set up dedicated funding for pedestrian improvements nearly 20 years ago.