Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Surface Transportation Reauthorization bill. I want to thank Chairman Shuster and Ranking Member DeFazio for developing a bipartisan bill that is generally balanced and makes significant improvements in some key areas. I am concerned that the funding levels in the bill are simply not high enough. We have an almost $1 trillion backlog on our highways, bridges, rail, and transit system, yet this bill provides flat funding of just $325 billion over 6 years. Finding bipartisan consensus on revenue is challenging, but I am confident that a majority in Congress would support funding higher-than-baseline levels with small increases for inflation. Despite the funding challenges, the bill makes a major improvement by creating the Nationally Significant Freight and Highway Projects program, which will provide guaranteed dedicated funding for large- scale multimodal projects critical to our regional and national economy. This was a key recommendation of the freight panel on which I was ranking member with Mr. Duncan as chairman. It is essential that we assist projects that are too big or complex for States to address on their own. We made some progress in SAFETEA-LU and MAP-21, but this bill finally gets it right and corrects decades of neglect by providing guaranteed funding for multimodal freight projects.…”