Max Baucus: “Mr. President, today we are currently operating under a 6-year ISTEA highway bill. The bill before us is a new 6-year…”

“Mr. President, today we are currently operating under a 6-year ISTEA highway bill. The bill before us is a new 6-year ISTEA bill. This new bill will bring up to date some of the provisions that are in the current law. By up to date, I refer to the formulas. Believe it or not, our current formula uses some historical factors such as the 1980 census data, as well as the 1916 postal road miles. That outdated data is included in the current funding formula to allocate dollars among the States. When writing the new bill, the committee thought it made a lot of sense to dispense with the use of the old data. After all, some of the data are pretty old. The 1980's is old enough, but the 1916 postal road miles is going a bit far. The current ISTEA program also has a lot of accounts. Eleven to be exact. It is difficult for States to work with all the different accounts. And it is a bit complex. So the new bill we are debating today eliminates that old historical data and brings the funding formulas up to date. This new bill also reduces the number of accounts from 11 to 5.”