DALLAS – The House on Tuesday passed a three-week extension of federal transportation funding that would keep reimbursements to states for highway and transit projects flowing through Nov. 20.
“This doesn’t give us much time,” said Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said after the voice vote. “We’ve got to get the six-year bill passed next week and get to conference with the Senate in short order.”
The Transportation Department’s authority to make payments to states from the Highway Trust Fund would expire Thursday without the extension, the 35th short-term HTF fix since 2009.
The extended deadline will give the House an opportunity to pass a multiyear bill and then reconcile it with a six-year transportation measure (H.R. 22) approved by the Senate in late July, Shuster said.
Shuster introduced the six-year Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2015(H.R. 3763), which was approved by the committee on Oct. 22, as well as the short-term fix (H.R. 3819).
“I am confident that we can resolve the differences between the House and Senate measures and produce a final product that’s good for our nation’s infrastructure,” Shuster said Monday. “This extension will allow the highway bill process to continue moving forward without shutting down transportation programs and projects across the country.”
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a floor speech on Monday that the differences between the Senate’s $360 billion, six-year DRIVE Act and the House committee’s highway bill can be resolved “in a matter of hours, not days.”
Inhofe is confident that a six-year transportation bill could be passed by Congress and sent to President Obama by Thanksgiving.
“The House will move a short-term extension to Nov. 20 this week, and I hope the Senate passes it quickly so the House can move the T&I-reported bill on the floor and we can move to a quickly resolved conference,” Inhofe said. “Due to the similarity in both of our bills, I am confident Congress can, and should, have a bill on the president’s desk by Thanksgiving.”
Shuster was reluctant to endorse Inhofe’s optimistic reconciliation timetable but agreed with the Thanksgiving estimate.
“I would like to see it take a couple of hours. I'm not so sure that will happen,” Shuster told reporters Monday night. “It's going to take some time, but I think we can get it done in a reasonable amount of time. My goal is, let's get it done before Thanksgiving.”
The House committee’s multiyear bill does not include a revenue title to resolve the $15 billion gap between HTF revenues and expenditures. A funding plan must be developed by the House Ways and Means Committee and added to the measure before it is approved by the full House.
The Senate bill covers the HTF’s structural shortfall in the first three years with $45.4 billion of general revenue offsets, with funding for the final three years yet to be determined.
A proposed $9 billion offset realized by the sale of 101 million barrels of crude oil from the 695 million barrels stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve drew the ire of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
“While I recognize that a long-term highway bill is a priority, a shortsighted sale that undermines our emergency preparedness could have real and lasting impacts on our security,” she said. “On the merits and in its timing, this is simply the wrong approach.”
Questions over federal highway funding prompted the Georgia Department of Transportation last week to remove 34 road projects totaling $123 million from its December bid list.
“Temporary fixes do not create the certainty state DOTs require in order to plan major transportation projects,” said Georgia highway commissioner Russell McMurry. “We can't do long-term transportation planning with short-term funding fixes.”
