With the failure of Congress to pass the highway bill before adjourning for the Thanksgiving holiday, numerous road projects across the country could come to a standstill and America could be facing a disaster, according to the House transportation committee chairman.

“(The nation is) on the cusp of a disaster in transportation if we don’t act soon,” said Rep. Don Young, the Alaskan Republican who is chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

Executive vice president of OOIDA, Todd Spencer, said that even though the lame duck session of Congress has a few more working days after this holiday break, he believes the highway bill is dead.

“The fact that lawmakers didn’t act means it is effectively over,” Spencer said Monday, Nov. 22. “That means the whole process starts all over with new bills to be introduced with the new Congress.”

Spencer said the good news is that OOIDA and its members will have another chance to address key trucking industry concerns as the new bills are developed. In particular, he said that the shortage of rest areas and parking places for trucks as well as the push by some to add tolls to existing interstate highways are topics that everyone should be talking about to their lawmakers.

“And hopefully this will give us another opportunity to get lawmakers to spend more of highway trust funds on actual highway projects,” Spencer said.

Other observers predict that the lack of a highway bill will wreak havoc with more than just the transportation industry. A survey this year by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials found that a congressional delay of even six months would cost more than 90,000 jobs and halt $2.1 billion in transportation projects. Because the delay has already gone on much longer, the association says the costs are no doubt larger.

“Because of the lack of certainty in funding, many states are taking projects they would have started soon, or have already started, and saying, ‘We don’t know if we can get that done, so we’ll just wait,’” said Jennifer Gavin, spokeswoman for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

The nation has gone more than a year without a federal highway bill. In September Congress approved some highway spending through May 2005. The last six-year federal spending plan expired more than a year ago, but Congress has repeatedly put off passing a highway spending bill because of a threatened presidential veto.

“All of the federal transportation programs remain in limbo,” Genevieve Giuliano, director of the National Center for Metropolitan Transportation Research at the University of Southern California told Copley News Service.

There is also a risk that because the highway bill will have to wait until next year, a new Congress and President Bush might have to start negotiating all over again.

“There will be a need to more or less start over,” Gavin said. “You lose a lot of hard work that way.”

By Coral Beach, Land Line staff
Coral_beach@landlinemag.com