Streetsblog Capitol Hill

In the debate over how -- and whether -- to set measurable performance standards for determining where federal transportation money gets spent, real estate developers are a quiet but powerful player. In a report released today, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) tracked the broad reach of land-use interests and found more than 100 groups spending $5.5 million on transport lobbying last year.

CPI's research, collected in the interactive map pictured above, serves as a case study of the muddled system that currently exists for funding worthy transportation projects on both the state and local levels. Reporter Matthew Lewis begins with a look at one road earmark added to the 2005 transport law by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY):

The relatively small earmark came after the developer, Concord Associates’ Louis Cappelli, and his team opened their wallets and donated a combined $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, then headed by Schumer. None had ever contributed to that political action committee (PAC) before. Some of the same executives gave an additional $64,000 to the committee over the next few years, after the bill with the earmark was signed into law.

But the New York Department of Transportation did not claim this specific million-dollar earmark. Its intended purpose — to study widening Route 17 from two to three lanes in each direction over a 43 mile stretch — did not appear to be a priority for the state. The stretch of road in question starts near the village of Harriman and extends northwest to Sullivan County, where Cappelli envisions a huge “Entertainment City” to restore the Catskills to its former fame as a vacation destination and generator of much-needed local jobs.

Of course, Schumer is far from the only member of Congress using the legislative process to leapfrog home-state bureaucracy and win dedicated funding for a favored project. CPI goes on to identify an array of other lawmakers targeted for campaign contributions by real-estate executives with a stake in local infrastructure decision-making.

The report illustrates a transportation earmarking process that is ripe for misuse, but it also takes a risk by using state priority lists as an impartial standard to judge the usefulness of individual projects. In the case of New York, the widening of Route 17 was not on the state's radar, but widening the Bronx's Major Deegan expressway was -- until local opposition killed the proposal.

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The trouble with broad analysis pieces on campaign cash is that they often go for eye-popping numbers while obscuring uncomfortable political realities. For example, Greenwire reported this morning that the 27 senators who remain undecided on the chamber's pending climate bill took "more than $20 million ... over the past two decades from energy interests with a direct stake in pending legislation."

That $20 million figure is certainly impressive. But the story never defines its terminology: Should the private-equity giant Carlyle Group be classified as an "energy interest," given that it has stakes in 40 energy companies, or as an unrelated financial firm?

And given that Republicans, with the exception of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), have shown little willingness to negotiate on pending climate legislation, why attach the "fence-sitter" label to senators such as John McCain (R-AZ) -- who days ago slammed the chamber's bill as "horrendous"?

But Greenwire's calculations are worth re-running because they smartly combine the transportation and electricity industries into one bloc. As electrified transport continues to command Washington's attention, automakers and power providers are finding their priorities increasingly in alignment -- and their lobbying goals coalescing around similar government support.

Of the 27 senators deemed climate fence-sitters by Greenwire, 17 are Democrats. Using data from the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics (which only dates back 20 years), Streetsblog Capitol Hill ran down the numbers on how much campaign money those 17 senators received from the transportation and electricity interests that ranked among their top 20 donors.

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In the wake of the 2007 collapse of Minnesota's I-35 bridge, Washington policymakers vowed a renewed focus on repairing the nation's aging infrastructure. But weeks after the fatal collapse, Congress approved a transportation spending bill with 704 earmarked projects, at a total cost topping $570 million -- and just 11 percent of those earmarks went towards bridge repair, according to a new report released today.

Today's report, produced by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), contrasts the low amounts lawmakers set aside for bridge repair with the flood of campaign contributions sent their way by highway, development, automobile, and construction groups.

During the election cycle that reached its peak in 2008, the year that bridge repairs accounted for 74 of Congress' 704 transportation earmarks, U.S. PIRG found that road-building interests steered $80.3 million to federal campaigns.

The same highway-centric groups also lavished $53.5 million in campaign cash on state elections, in which the costs of securing a victory are often much lower, according to the report. Road-building interests split their federal donations more evenly, steering 47 percent to Democrats and 53 percent to Republicans, compared with a 61-39 split in favor of the GOP in state elections.

The report (available here) separates donations from "transportation" versus "construction" groups but does not name which lobbying entities U.S. PIRG singled out for analysis, making it difficult to directly connect specific donations to specific earmarks.

But the authors' conclusion "that elected officials often overlook preventative maintenance projects, especially when new capacity projects are encouraged by campaign contributions" was bolstered by an Associated Press investigation one year after the Minnesota collapse. That AP probe found that just 12 percent of the deficient bridges getting the most state-level traffic had received any attention other than regular maintenance.

"The greatest need, for almost every place, is investing in existing infrastructure," said Mark Stout, who spent 25 years working on policy at the New Jersey DOT before helping put together U.S. PIRG's report.

"Each earmark and each project has its own story," he added, "but by and large, I think it's safe to say that a structurally deficient bridge is not going to rally around it a lot of local elected officials and business interests that are lobbying to make [repairs] happen. They sort of think that's someone else's job or that someone else is going to take care of it."

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Interest groups seeking to influence transportation policy-making have long flooded the capital with campaign cash and lobbyists -- and their numbers are rising at an eye-popping rate. Nearly 1,800 interests are employing at least 2,100 transportation lobbyists to work the system in anticipation of the next federal infrastructure bill, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation unveiled today.

The Center's work directly answers a question asked by many attendees at last week's University of Virginia infrastructure conference: How can the public be awakened to the relevance and political importance of transportation as an issue?

Unfortunately for the elite industry players who attended the conference, the answer may be that the public isn't yet aware of just how much waste is built into state and federal transportation spending. From the Center's initial report:

The matter of how and from where the federal money is actually doled out is among the biggest headaches. The majority of federal dollars for these various transportation programs actually get distributed to state and local governments to be spent at their discretion. But that has caused problems.

For one thing, wrote the Government Accountability Office last year, “Rigorous economic analysis does not generally drive the investment decisions of state and local governments.” That was an understatement. Most state transportation agencies surveyed by the GAO in 2004 — 34 out of 43 — called political support and public opinion “very important” when investing federal dollars. Only eight states attributed the same importance to cost-benefit analyses.

With the debate in Congress currently focused not on how to reform the bloated, broken system but how long to delay reform, it's unclear whether the Center's findings can move the needle in the short term.

But that all-but-certain postponement of the next federal transportation bill makes today's report all the more shocking. Anyone who reads it will find no reason to support 12 or 18 more months of federal transportation funding distributed through an unaccountable system of state DOTs.

Transportation lobbying is a complicated universe, in which multi-issue environmental groups can be as active as organizations that exist only to influence infrastructure decision-making.

But to shed some more light on a cast of characters that Streetsblog Capitol Hill began introducing last month, it's worth exploring who represents Washington's two largest transportation players and how much those groups have spent this year.

The American Association of State and Highway Transportation Officials, or AASHTO, is the road lobby's leading voice, reporting more than $53 million in annual revenue on its most recent publicly available Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filing.

With a membership of state-level public officials, AASHTO does not employ in-house lobbyists but contracts out with several firms, spending $270,000 in the first half of this year, according to congressional disclosures.

AASHTO's team includes Jack Schenendorf of Covington & Burling, a former chief of staff on the House transportation committee who advised the Bush administration's DOT transition team in 2001, and Brett Thompson of the International Government Relations Group, a firm run by his former boss, ex-Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO).

The other lobbyists reporting work for AASHTO this year are William Malley of Perkins Coie, whose experience lies in environmental review of infrastructure projects, and Kathy Ruffalo-Farnsworth, a veteran staffer for members of both parties who helped craft the 2005 federal transportation bill before Congress appointed her to serve on a high-profile commission that examined the system's financing challenges.

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As Washington waits for the next federal transportation bill to emerge, Streetsblog Capitol Hill is taking a featured look at debates from the last congressional go-round that could impact the upcoming re-write. For today's installment, let's take a trip to New Jersey, circa late 2004.

Just before resigning amid ethical scandal, then-Gov. Jim McGreevey (D) sought to block businesses from using campaign donations to win government contracts -- a move known as "pay to play."

McGreevey's order was written broadly, but it raised red flags at one particular agency: the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), which charged that the anti-corruption law inhibited competition for road-building contracts.

The FHWA ultimately forced New Jersey to exempt highway contracts from its "pay to play" law by withholding $250 million in federal aid. Yet the state's congressional delegation persisted, adding language to the House version of the 2005 federal transportation bill that allowed New Jersey's law to affect highway contractors.

New Jersey's senators tried to keep that language alive in the final version of the 2005 highway bill, but their efforts fell eight votes short in the upper chamber of Congress. Exactly eight Democrats voted to preserve the status quo, along with the majority of Republicans.

However, two notable Democrats backed New Jersey's anti-corruption move: then-Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Joe Biden (D-DE).

Four years later, Obama and Biden are in the White House -- but they have not changed the FHWA's stance on "pay to play" laws. In fact, a similar anti-corruption statute in the president's home state of Illinois that Obama backed during his presidential run had to be amended earlier this year to carve out a loophole for road contracts, at the insistence of the new administration.

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