Paul Tonko: “Absolutely. When you talk about roads and bridges, my home county of Montgomery, New York, in my district, was host to a…”

“Absolutely. When you talk about roads and bridges, my home county of Montgomery, New York, in my district, was host to a terrible bridge collapse. We commemorated in 2012 the 25th anniversary of the collapse of a thruway bridge that took several lives. That was a stark reminder 25, 26 years ago. We have only accumulated more concern for deficiencies. So it's roads and bridges. It's rail, as you made mention. But it's also telecommunications and utilities. You look at a system that was engineered to be a monopoly, serving regions of energy needs for people, and then with deregulation came the wheeling of electrons from region to region, State to State, nation to nation. You had Canada wheeling in electrons to New York State. We need to upgrade the system. The interconnection devices need to be upgraded. There's new technology. You get more efficiency, less line loss. These are the things that are smart. And we're asking with this package that we've talked about here tonight, let's be smart. Let's respect the hard- earned tax dollars that are under our stewardship. In August of 2003, I was serving in State government in New York when we had a major collapse of the system that was driven by transmission. An outage in Ohio triggered a collapse into New York. So Ohio put out the lights on Broadway in New York City. And this was long-term in its consequences. Great economic loss, great challenge to us.…”