By Kevin McCarty
March 5, 2012

Senate leaders continue to press for an agreement that will allow further action on surface transportation renewal legislation (S. 1813), an effort that seeks to produce the necessary 60 votes to move forward on pending amendments.

A scheduled March 6 cloture vote will determine whether the agreement can garner the 60-vote supermajority that is needed to move the Senate process forward. Failing to invoke closure by this majority, Senate leaders would resume negotiations on another cloture motion, a measure that again would require adoption by 60 Senators before the many pending amendments to the legislation can be considered.

One such amendment is being championed by former Anchorage Mayor and now Alaska Senator Mark Begich, who is seeking to restore the local funding share under the bill’s Transportation Mobility Program (TMP). Begich’s efforts are strongly supported by the Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties, among other organizations.

Begich’s amendment simply seeks to distribute TMP program funds to local areas in the same manner as current law has provided since 1991 under the Surface Transportation Program (which S. 1813 renamed the TMP program). Adoption of his amendment has no effect on funds apportioned to the states; it only affects how these very flexible funds are allocated within each state.

Adoption of this amendment becomes more important for cities and local areas, as S. 1813 eliminates several categorical programs that deliver resources directly to local and regional transportation priorities. The savings from eliminating these local programs helped allow the authors of S. 1813 to increase TMP funding by 34 percent. At the same time, local areas under the legislation receive a smaller share of TMP funds, while states would see their share increase significantly, directing most of the increased TMP funding to states. Sen. Begich’s amendment ensures that local governments and their regions share proportionally in this additional TMP dollars.

Overall, the Senate bill authorizes the federal surface transportation law for two years through Fiscal Year 2013, providing $109 billion for highway, transit and safety programs. Unlike the earlier version of the House bill (H.R. 7), Senate transportation leaders preserved the 30-year commitment to highway and transit program funding, ensuring that the all surface transportation needs rise and fall together, not separately.

The Senate legislation, which was developed on a bipartisan basis, also expands earlier commitments to innovative financing, by increasing funding for the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA). This significant expansion of the TIFIA program has been a top priority of Conference President Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraiogosa.

Efforts to move beyond partisan Committee votes collapsed when House Speaker John Boehner (OH) directed his colleagues, including House Transportation and Infrastructure John Mica (FL), to develop new legislation reducing the authorization period and costs, and removing provisions that eliminated transit funding from the Transportation Trust Fund.

By removing transit from the Trust Fund and losing its assured share of annual funding, H.R. 7 triggered a backlash among transit providers, cities and counties, transit users and advocates and many private sector organizations, resulting in the loss of critical votes that were needed to move the bill through the House.

House leaders are now working to develop a path forward for action on revised legislation and have not provided a date for when a new bill would come before the full House.

Notably, impediments to final passage in the Senate are unrelated to the substance of the transportation provisions, much of which were developed on a bipartisan basis; rather, the delay in the Senate results for continuing disagreements between the party leaders on what non-transportation related amendments will be made in order during deliberations on S. 1813.

The eighth extension of the SAFETEA-LU law, the last reauthorization of the surface transportation law enacted in 2005, expires March 31, making a ninth extension very likely at this point.