Steelmanning Reauthorization: Way More Than You Wanted to Know IV

SAFETEA-LU (2005)

Taxpayers for Common Sense (left-of-center) coined the Ketchikan Bridge as the “Bridge to Nowhere,” by comparing it to…The Big Dig? The methodology is laughable, but the project even more so.

Reference (will be at the top of every post):

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

---

SAFETEA-LU (2005):

There might be too much “tea,” even though it continues to be a great sequence of letters to put transportation, equity, and act together in a row. SAFETEA-LU is remembered for a few pieces of fun Congressional whosawatsits:

• Pork, a precursor to the pullback on earmarks in MAP-21, is out of control. We’ve got the “Bridge to Nowhere” mini fiasco, Dennis Hastert insider trading, and a huge handful of questionable dollars wasted as quid pro quo. I maintain that spending too much to root out graft is a relatively huge waste of money, and that we can afford a little hagglebacon to get the majority of what we want done, done.

• New Starts, Multimodalism, and the belief that if the Department of Transportation should exist, it should support movement by means other than highway spending. Remember, we’re only about 18 or so years out from the practical “completion” of the Interstate Highway System, and many of the Congresspeople who understood transportation very little then, understand it even less now.

Continuing the series:

Power: State >> Federal >> Regional >> Local. The big shift is in environmental review. The overwhelming confluence of new and complex projects intersecting with NEPA review (written and ossified in the 1970s) hasn’t kept up with our governments’ ability to monitor and certify projects. Time adds cost and risk, and no project can withstand an indefinite hold while the different authorities fight over who’s left holding the football, and lawsuit after lawsuit results in an injunction, while we debate whether a bird species’ habitat can be moved.¹ So the Fed did the only logical thing: devolve NEPA review to the states to “self-certify.” Certainly, nothing could go wrong.

Mode: Added more support for transit (New Starts in 5309), extended TIFIA and RRIF programs. The “New Freedoms” program focused on transit applications specifically for seniors and people with mobility challenges/disabled people. Safe Routes to School was added as a priority funding program for the first time.

Complexity: This bill feels like a hold steady; more sections added for hazmat, motor carriers (trucks/lorries). For the first time, there’s a specific pilot program authorized to leverage federal dollars with private investment—PPP or P3s take a prominent place. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics is established here, demonstrating the need for more data-driven decisions at the federal level. ALSO included are University Transportation Centers for the first time—devolving / and funding to our higher education institutions to work on complicated research projects.

Flexibility: Little mention of flexibility in this bill. I do find it strange that Highway Safety Improvement Program dollars were not incorporated in Title II Highway Safety, but that’s probably because we’re way too focused on the administration of roads and whose fault traffic deaths are to notice the interconnected nature of safety. We’ve lost the thread here a little—highway/road safety at its core is not about who’s responsible, but working at all cylinders to prevent these crashes/injuries/deaths.

Geography: Multimodalism focus and a focus on intergovernmental affairs and right-sizing the relationship between regional governments and states. Nothing about cities or sub-regional governments at all.

Included Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) (the guy who brought the snowball onto the Senate floor to argue against climate change) “midnight rider,” which sought to usurp EPA authority for oil and gas in sovereign territories in Oklahoma only. Not great and maybe a final straw for pork in these omnibus reauthorization bills.

---

One point that consistently comes up in my research and my socialization of these ideas is that there has to be more to each bill than a straighforward read of the text. And there is. We should ask questions like what was left on the House/Senate committee floors? What if we had just 1% more leadership for transit, rail and non-highway spending? What stories give excellent color to these bills that tell a bigger tale about power and Federalism? I hope my literature review gets into this eventually, so stay tuned.

1. I support the birds, but maybe not?