On the recordJuly 15, 2014
I thank Chairman Shuster and Ranking Member Rahall for bringing this before us today. This short-term highway trust fund fix is crucial for keeping our highway and transit systems solvent, and I intend to vote for it. Letting the highway trust fund become insolvent would be irresponsible and cut 700,000 jobs and increase congestion. But once our work is done here today, we do need a long-term, creative solution to fund our much- needed transportation projects in this country. Over 64 percent of the roads in Los Angeles are in utter disrepair, costing each resident driver nearly $832 a year. My own dad, who was a county supervisor in Los Angeles for 40 years, used to offer people a dollar for every pothole they could find in his district. If he made that offer today, he would go broke. To fill this funding gap, I support looking at different ways of funding our roads in addition to the gas tax, such as vehicle miles traveled, which charges drivers by the miles that they travel. For our national economy, we need to focus on freight infrastructure. Freight bottlenecks cost us approximately $200 billion a year. Yesterday, I introduced the National Freight Network Trust Fund Act for a long-term fix that creates dedicated funding for our freight infrastructure. I urge all of my colleagues to support this short-term fix and join me in looking forward to solving this problem long term.
