Orrin Hatch: “throughout my time as ranking member and now chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, finding money for surface…”

“throughout my time as ranking member and now chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, finding money for surface transportation infrastructure has been a persistent and seemingly intractable problem. Even as we went into this year with a new Republican majority in the Senate, none of us could have imagined that we could find a way to provide 5 years of solvency and stability for the highway trust fund. Yet, with today's announcement of the completed conference report, that is precisely where we are right now. The conference report for the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act will hopefully be enacted within a few days' time. As the very first member of the conference committee to sign the report, I want to briefly talk about the process by which the legislation came about and how we got to where we are now. Immediately before the Memorial Day recess, there was an unsuccessful attempt to put together a package to possibly get the highway trust fund through the rest of 2016. The agonizing difficulty we faced at that time in dragging ourselves through another 18 months gave us a desire to think bigger than we had before. This is why I was determined to help find a way out of the cycle of short-term infrastructure bills and why I believed it was necessary for us to think outside of the proverbial box and look everywhere for potential offsets.…”