Insufficient funding for infrastructure remains the top concern of 91% of cities, towns and villages recently surveyed by the National League of Cities.
How much Congress can agree on approving to fill that gap remained an unanswered question Wednesday following a bipartisan meeting at the White House where Republican congressional leaders emphasized their unwillingness to consider tax increases or undoing the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
President Biden met in the Oval Office for nearly two hours with top Republican and Democratic congressional leaders to discuss a bipartisan way forward on this issue.
“What's the bottom line here is, we're going to see whether we can reach some consensus on compromise,” Biden told reporters who were allowed briefly in the Oval Office as he prepared to sit down for the private talks. “There's not much more to say right now.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., stressed the need for ambitious goals during his leader’s floor remarks a couple of hours prior to the meeting.
“We cannot be small minded or passive,” he said. “We must be big and bold to meet the changes in the world, the rapid changes that are occurring in the world.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., used his morning floor remarks to point out there’s a history of bipartisanship on this subject.
The last major surface transportation bill approved by the Senate was “a totally bipartisan effort across broad ideological lines” that had 83 supporters, McConnell said.
The White House meeting — which was the first for congressional leaders since 2019 — came during another week of Washington events held under the rubric of “infrastructure week” by the nonpartisan group United for Infrastructure.
After the meeting, the White House issued a statement saying Biden spent “nearly two hours working with them to identify areas where they could collaborate, especially with regard to infrastructure, on which the leaders agreed there was a need for investment.”
McConnell remained upbeat after the meeting.
He said Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris understand that congressional Republicans are not interested in undoing the provisions of their 2017 tax legislation.
“Almost all of the discussion was about infrastructure,” McConnell said. “I think I’m certainly safe in saying there is certainly a bipartisan desire to get an outcome.”
McConnell said the first task will be agreeing on a definition of what constitutes infrastructure.
“I don't favor having a top down dictation, as to what this package looks like, but rather a consultative process in which everybody in my conference is involved in,” he said.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., also said he’s optimistic “there's a place that we can find bipartisanship.”
“That's not home health,” McCarthy cautioned. “That's roads, bridges, highways, airports, broadband. Those are the places we could find common ground to work together.”
Outside groups have looked at the get-together as a positive sign.
“This time there are bipartisan conversations in Washington that are happening and continuing,” Irma Esparza Diggs, the director of federal advocacy for the National League of Cities, said during a webinar sponsored by the NLC on Tuesday.
“We are seeing movement on targeted bills around water, broadband workforce and transportation,” Diggs added.
The NLC webinar highlighted the proposed infrastructure projects that are the most important to the local officials who participated in the call.
Mayor Victoria Woodards of Tacoma, Washington, said her city needs $180 million for the rehabilitation of the Fishing Wars Memorial Bridge. The bridge, which opened in 1927, links Tacoma to the city of Fife to the east.
“This bridge is designated as a heavy haul corridor, as it is intended to serve as a cargo transportation route for the port of Tacoma, which is one of North America's largest container ports,” Woodard said.
Aaron Banks, president of the Jackson City Council in Mississippi, said that access to clean and affordable drinking water is his city’s top infrastructure issue.
Councilwoman Ana Sandoval of San Antonio, Texas said her priority is remaking a road on the west side of her city that ranks No. 1 for pedestrian traffic deaths. “We've had people killed waiting at bus stops on this road” who weren’t even trying to cross it, she said.
Mayor Jake Spano of St. Louis Park, Minnesota listed three projects. One is the long term cleanup of groundwater from a former creosote factory and the other two are transit projects involving the expansion of the blue and green lines into his community from the adjacent Twin Cities.
Spano echoed the other local officials in saying that his community needs the federal government as a partner to help pay for the projects.
The NLC survey that ranked insufficient infrastructure funding as the top concern of local officials was the result of a March through April NLC poll of 596 local leaders.
Also ranking high in that survey was a lack of pre-development funds at 56%, funding for essential services at 31%, and hiring workers skilled for infrastructure at 27%.
