Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Looking to hire a smart, qualified person for a position in transportation planning, engineering, IT, or advocacy? Post a listing on the Streetsblog Jobs Board and reach our national audience of dedicated readers.

Looking for a job? Here are this week’s listings:

Grassroots and Outreach Fellow, Safe Routes to School National Partnership, Anywhere
The Safe Routes to School National Partnership is seeking a Grassroots and Outreach Fellow to grow the Safe Routes to School movement at the local level and engage them in grassroots advocacy. This opportunity will provide fellows with hands-on experience in coalition-building and grassroots lobbying.

StreetsMedia Development Intern, StreetsMedia, New York City
We are seeking a StreetsMedia Development Intern for Winter-Spring 2012. StreetsMedia is the online advocate for better transportation, smarter cities, and urban sustainability, and includes Streetsblog and Streetfilms. StreetsMedia is currently diversifying our funding strategy and the intern will play an integral part in supporting this effort.

Bicycle Valet Coordinator, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, San Francisco
The SF Bicycle Coalition is looking for a highly motivated, talented individual to manage the Coalition’s world famous Valet Bicycle Parking program.

Safety Educator, New York City Department of Transportation, New York City
Safety educators serve as a traffic safety outreach program coordinator/educator, conducting and assisting with the development of a variety of traffic safety educational presentations and creative art and theater projects for children, youth and older adults. Multiple positions available.

How can you convince Americans that transportation is important enough to invest in?

That’s the question that brought together five former U.S. Transportation Secretaries this week at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

Former DOT Chief James Burnley took a swipe at Transportation Enhancements and the stimulus.

James Burnley was deputy secretary and then secretary under President Reagan. He took the position that “75 percent” of the public “gives the thumbs down to paying more for transportation” because we’re giving them the wrong argument about why it matters. He took a jab at President Obama’s stimulus program:

We have to stop treating transportation infrastructure as a short-term jobs program. It didn’t work by any conventional definition of what “working” means. We all knew –those of us who have expertise in the field – it would not work in terms of short-term stimulus.

Because it takes time – it takes years for that money to actually be spent and people to be hired. We need to convince the American people that we need to invest in transportation infrastructure because we need to invest in transportation infrastructure. If we sell that idea – not as a jobs program, but because it affects the ability of our economy to grow over time, our international competitiveness and all the other things that we believe it affects, then we’ve got a fighting shot at convincing the American people that the resources that we believe ought to be devoted to transportation should be devoted to it.

That’s a legitimate point, and Streetsblog has made the same argument – that selling transportation as a jobs program undersells the true value of transportation. But there are a few problems with what Burnley is saying. First, when asked to tax themselves at the local or state level for transportation improvements, 75 percent of voters say yes. So maybe the case isn’t so hard to make after all.

And second, most Republicans – and many Democrats – fault the stimulus for not investing enough in infrastructure. Not quite seven percent of the package was devoted to infrastructure, and many critics say that’s why the stimulus didn’t do more to create jobs. Certainly, the president’s desire for “shovel-ready” projects may have been naïve, which Obama himself has publicly admitted. But Burnley may have been over-simplifying things with his statement.

Meanwhile, Sam Skinner, who served under President George H.W. Bush, argued that too many bridges to nowhere have eroded public confidence. And it’s not just transportation, he said – government mishandling of Medicare and pensions and everything else leads to overall distrust that the government can handle anything at all, despite the fact that the transportation department has proven that it “actually can complete projects under budget and on time.”

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With no movement on a highway bill from House T&I Chairman John Mica until after Congress reconvenes in January, Ranking Member Nick Rahall held a press conference today to introduce the “Invest in American Jobs Act of 2011” [PDF]. The act would strengthen the “Buy America” requirements already in place on transit, rail, highway, bridge, and aviation programs.

This streetcar was made in Oregon, but will transit suffer under a Democratic mandate to buy all components stateside? Photo: Seattle Transit Blog

Among the bill’s stipulations:

• 100 percent of components and subcomponents of transit rolling stock must be made in the US by fiscal year 2016 (currently a 60 percent requirement, to be raised incrementally)
• Amtrak would lose its exemption from Buy America on projects under $1 million
• Any exemptions to Buy America sought will be subject to a period of public comment and must be reported to the Secretary of Transportation

It also seeks to eliminate loopholes for segmented or subcontracted projects like the east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Rahall specifically cited the bridge, the largest public works project in California’s history, as having been built using 43,000 tons of Chinese steel—“Made in China, but paid for by American taxpayers.”

The bill is the latest in a growing list of job-creation proposals and counter-proposals to come from either the President or Congress. And like those prior proposals, this one is unlikely to go very far.

Think of it as the Democrats’ answer to “drilling-for-infrastructure” (maybe “regulation-for-protectionism”?). While representatives from the AFL-CIO, United Steel Workers, and United Streetcar threw their support behind the bill at the announcement, a Republican House pushing to de-regulate everything will be unlikely to get behind a Democratic proposal to create additional regulatory burdens – and costs – for industry.

Indeed, it’s easy to read the bill as a mere political maneuver. Rather than letting the Republicans claim credit for introducing a transportation bill they’re overtly touting as a jobs-creator — and then letting them blame Democrats for refusing to pass it — the Democrats are trying to get out in front with their own unpassable jobs-and-transportation bill.

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Two competing versions of a transportation-related job creation bill went down yesterday in the Senate. The first, the Rebuild America Jobs Act (S.1769), was a Democratic proposal, modeled on President Obama’s job creation bill, to invest $50 billion for infrastructure and another $10 billion as seed money to create a new national infrastructure bank.

Bills to put unemployed construction workers back on the job keep going down in Congress.

Given Republican opposition to what they consider a repeat of a failed stimulus – and to an infrastructure bank they say is unnecessary at best and politicized at worst — the failure of the bill is no surprise. The bill garnered a slim majority — 51-49 — but not enough to overcome the threat of a GOP filibuster.

Meanwhile, the Republican proposal would have pushed back many health, safety, and environmental regulations that corporations consider onerous. Defeated in a 47-53 vote, the bill also would have extended SAFETEA-LU for two more years — nearly matching the length and spending levels in the bipartisan EPW proposal — without funding the shortfall such spending would cause to the Highway Trust Fund. The bill wouldn’t have been a “clean” extension of current law, though, since it eliminated the “set-aside” for bike and pedestrian infrastructure, making it the fourth attempt in less than two months by Senate Republicans to eliminate or weaken TE — and the fourth failure.

Tuesday night, the Senate blocked a vote on the president’s jobs plan. As had been forecast, Republicans voted unanimously against the plan, and they weren’t alone: Two Democrats joined them – Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Now it’s on to Plan B, which involves breaking up the bill into pieces to be voted on separately.

Sen. Schumer's plan to salvage the jobs bill wouldn't resuscitate plans for $50 billion in transportation spending. Photo: AP

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer has proposed narrowing the bill down to two parts – one favored by Democrats, the other by Republicans. Under the plan, an infrastructure bank would be created in the model endorsed by the president and the Kerry-Hutchison BUILD Act. In exchange, there would be a tax holiday for corporations to bring back to the U.S. profits they made overseas.

Obama’s bill had also called for a $50 billion investment in transportation infrastructure, and that appears to be dead as the Senate pursues Schumer’s plan. The House had dismissed the transportation component long ago, with Republican leadership saying they might hold a vote on the pieces of the bill that appeal to them (surprise — stimulus spending isn’t one of them). Meanwhile, some insiders say that Republicans in the House are getting serious about passing a transportation reauthorization before March 31 so that they can show that they, too, are serious about job creation.

Of course, the path they seem to be setting out on involves paying for a higher level of transportation spending with oil drilling, a proposal that’s sure to run up against massive Democratic opposition and possibly even a presidential veto.

And many think that not much is going to happen on any of this until the super committee comes back with its proposals for deficit reduction before Thanksgiving.

Back to the Schumer jobs plan: We’ve written a lot, and will be writing more, about the pros and cons of an infrastructure bank. But what about this idea of repatriating overseas profits?

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Amid prognostications that the jobs bill is “dead” — including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s announcement that the House won’t vote on the bill in its entirety — Senate Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell said today that he’s just itching for a vote on the Senate floor.

Yes, it’s a tactic to make Obama look bad.

McConnell knows that the Democrats don’t have the votes yet to pass the bill in the Senate. He says he’s tired of the president blaming the Republicans for inaction, when no one benefits more from gridlock than the White House.

“How else do explain the fact that the president’s spent the past few weeks running around the country demanding that Congress pass his so-called Jobs Bill ‘right away’ even as leading members of his own party admit that Democrats wouldn’t have the votes to get it through Congress even if it came to the floor?” McConnell said.

Majority Leader Harry Reid, for his part, says he’s “disappointed” in McConnell for “playing games.” Reid says he’s planning to bring up the bill this month.

In other Congressional news, the House easily passed a “continuing resolution” to fund the government for six more weeks. And what will happen in six weeks? Another continuing resolution, you can be sure!

Congress has moved forward on some budget bills for FY2012 (which has already begun), but the pace has been lackadaisical. After all, there never was a real budget for FY2011, just a warmed-over FY2010 budget with a lot of bites taken out of it. And if you’ve been paying attention to the Congressional stalemating that got the country’s credit rating reduced, you probably know that the outlook isn’t much better for this year.

Congressional insiders say that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is refusing to hold an ”all or nothing” vote on President Obama’s jobs bill. Cantor says he’ll bring “elements” of the bill to the floor but not the whole bill.

Eric Cantor still thinks tax cuts create more jobs than, you know, job creation. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

It’s pretty clear which elements Cantor approves of. He expressed his preferences soon after the president unveiled his $447 billion job-creation proposal, which includes $50 billion for infrastructure investment — something Obama’s been pushing for (though not always pushing very hard) since Labor Day of last year.

“Over half, I think, of the total dollar amount is so-called stimulus spending,” Cantor told reporter Brian Beutler soon after Obama announced his jobs plan. “We’ve been there, done that. The country cannot afford more spending like the stimulus bill.”

The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen responded:

A little more than half of the American Jobs Act is made up of tax cuts. Cantor, at least today, didn’t reflexively rule out these provisions.

Instead, what Cantor disapproves of are the parts of the proposal most likely to create jobs — infrastructure investments, job training, unemployment aid, and assistance to states to prevent public-sector layoffs. It’s as if the oft-confused Majority Leader looked at the plan, found the measures that would have the great[est] impact to improve the economy, and immediately rejected them.

A Republican version of the jobs bill would almost certainly eliminate the infrastructure bank, which Obama proposed as part of the jobs bill. House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica immediately repudiated this idea, saying, “Unfortunately, a National Infrastructure Bank run by Washington bureaucrats requiring Washington approval and Washington red tape is moving in the wrong direction.” He preferred his own plan of encouraging states to set up their own banks.

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President Obama has proposed a plan to pay for the American Jobs Act, the $447 billion bill to create 1.9 million jobs, including $50 billion for infrastructure. His “pay-for” plan includes limitations on itemized deductions for the wealthy and the elimination of some tax loopholes for oil and gas companies.

Republicans have never met a problem that couldn't be solved with a little more of this.

Republicans have a different idea, though: oil drilling. Several GOP representatives have introduced bills to expand fossil fuel extraction and use the proceeds to fund transportation infrastructure.

Somehow, whatever the problem is in Washington, Democrats want to solve it by raising taxes on the wealthy, and Republicans want to solve it with oil drilling.

When it comes to funding a quick jolt to the economy, it’s pretty clear that oil drilling won’t really cut it. “Any royalties from any new energy development wouldn’t start flowing to the Treasury for years,” said Erich Zimmermann of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Essentially this would be like spending money now to be paid for with revenues that may or may not be realized at some future time. Sounds like a recipe for a doubling down on our current deficit mess.”

Some speculate that a GOP oil drilling plan would explain the recent news that House transportation leader John Mica, with permission from his party’s leadership, is looking to raise transportation funding levels by an extra $15 billion a year in his proposed six-year reauthorization bill. After all, they’ve said that raising the gas tax is off the table.

A plan to pay for transportation and infrastructure through oil drilling would erode the entire basis of the transportation funding system, which historically rests with the Highway Trust Fund, paid for with fuel taxes and a smattering of other fees on driving and vehicles. In fact, Congress requires that at least 90 percent of what the Highway Trust Fund spends must be generated from taxes “related to the purposes for which such outlays are or will be made.”

“Generating additional revenues from an increase in energy production, therefore, would likely violate this requirement and at the very least result in an override of the Budget Act,” Zimmermann said, “but would also call into some question the importance of the ‘user pays’ principle itself as it relates to paying for the transportation system.”

Whether or not Mica is planning on paying for his transportation bill with oil drilling is a matter of speculation at this point. But several other Republicans have already introduced bills to that effect.

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