National Transportation Funding Needs Report released by AASHTO

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) released a new report, The Bottom Line Report 2009, on national transportation needs last week.  The report was released as Congress begins discussing reauthorization of the national transportation bill.  The current bill, SAFETEA-LU expires on September 30, 2009.  For a brief review, see this article in the Wall Street Journal.

Congressman James Oberstar is chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and according to several articles, says he is sticking to a strict schedule to try to pass a new bill before the current bill expires.  Neither the Senate nor the Obama Administration seem to be operating on the same timeline, however.  Depending on what you read and who you talk to, the transportation bill will be reauthorized in time, or it won’t be reauthorized for another 1-2 years.  If that happens, the old bill will be extended until a new bill is authorized.  Regardless, critical discussions about the next bill, including the potential to completely transform the structure of the bill, and the funding mechanisms (e.g. gas tax, public-private partnerships - see page 2 of Road-RIPorter v.13, #4), are underway right now.

The national transportation bill includes funding for highway maintenance and construction, mass transit, and transportation enhancements.  It also provides funding for several public lands related line items, including the Public Lands Highways Program (which pays for paved roads on National Park Service and Forest Service lands among others) and the often problematic Recreational Trails Program which provides funding for motorized and nonmotorized trail development on state and federal lands.  For more information about challenges with the Recreational Trails Program (Wildlands CPR remains concerned about how this funding is used to develop new motorized routes) click here (see pages 10-11).

When SAFETEA-LU was signed into law in 2005, it included funding for wildlife and fisheries mitigation – specifically creating funds that could be used to install wildlife crossing structures on highways, and to fix culverts.  This was a significant step towards increasing the environmental mitigation (and possible restoration) funding opportunities available through the Federal Highways Administration for public lands roads.  The Bottom Line report estimates that an additional $7-10 billion per year is needed for environmental planning and mitigation in association with the highways bill.  Pages 115-117 of the full report argue that the bulk of this additional funding is for environmental analyses and associated litigation, while some of it is for on-the-ground work.  Unfortunately, the researchers found it difficult to quantify how much money was actually going into on-the-ground environmental mitigation.  This is important information and should be further researched before passage of any new legislation to ensure that the next highway bill includes reliable funding for environmental mitigation and restoration.

In December more than 100 groups around the country endorsed a letter that Wildlands CPR drafted  to Congress discussing the importance of providing road-related watershed restoration funding to the Forest Service as part of the reauthorization of the highways bill.  That funding would be specifically available for culvert upgrades/repairs and road reclamation on Forest Service lands.  

The AASHTO Bottom Line report identifies full funding for transportation needs adding up to approximately $1.5 trillion over the 6 year life of the bill.  That said, they only recommend that the new bill be funded at approximately 1/3 that level (~$545 billion for 6 years), with the Administration’s current recommendation even lower.  The stimulus bill is certainly going to have some impact on addressing highway maintenance needs, and it wasn’t clear to me from my brief review of the Bottom Line report if they considered the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on their overall transportation need estimates.

With stimulus funding, the Iraq war and transportation issues on the table, it’s become commonplace to throw around estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  It’s kind of funny how that changes your perspective on things.  For example, it certainly makes the request in our December letter look quite reasonable - $200 million/year for 6 years to fund Forest Service watershed restoration through road reclamation and culvert improvements.  Let’s hope Congress thinks so too, but we still have a lot of work to do before that will happen!

There's a Senate hearing scheduled for Tuesday, April 27, at 2:30 pm in room 253 Russell to discuss the transportation bill and future transportation needs.  Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will appear at the Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety and Security Subcommittee hearing.

Keep an eye on our blog for updates on transportation bill reauthorization issues related to environmental mitigation/restoration and the Recreational Trails Program.