With fuel prices at or near an all-time high, Congress finally passed a highway authorization bill and an energy bill before leaving Washington on recess for the month of August. The energy bill, proposed during the first term of President Bush, had been stalled for years by opponents to drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. After months of wrangling over spending caps in the highway bill and a series of 11 temporary extensions reaching back to late 2003, Congress approved new highway construction.
Passage of the energy bill, in particular, required several parliamentary moves to prevent opponents from killing it again. Before the final vote was taken on energy, the Alaska drilling proposal was removed from the bill and placed instead in the budget resolution for the next fiscal year. Following passage of the budget resolution, the energy bill passed. The Alaska drilling issue is now expected to pass when Congress returns from recess, because Senate rules forbid using unlimited debate to block the appropriations bills required by the budget resolution.
In all, the Bush administration gained three narrow, but significant victories in the week before the August recess. In addition to the highway and energy bills, Congress approved the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the closest contest carrying by two votes in the House of Representatives.
Wide approval margin
As is nearly always the case, the highway bill carries a grand title — the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Act: A Legacy for Users — on a piece of legislation that is otherwise known by the mundane number, HR 3, placed on it when its sponsors put the original in the hopper for house consideration. The final vote tally, 412 in favor with eight opposed in the House and 91 in favor with four opposed in the Senate, gives no hint of the wrangling, especially over individual spending projects, that accompanied its passage. In the course of negotiations, the President threatened to veto the measure more than once. He has yet to veto any other legislation during five years in office.
The bill authorizes spending on highway construction and other transportation projects for the next six years, covering transportation and safety programs from 2004 to 2009. It includes 2004, because the previous highway bill, TEA-21, expired at the end of September 2003 and was not reauthorized permanently until now. While, at a projected cost of $286.4 billion, the bill authorizes considerably more spending than the president wanted, the final version is significantly more frugal with tax dollars than the proposed $375 million that many in Congress wanted.
Funding from the highway bill is divided into three segments with 79% designated for highway projects, 18.5% for mass transit, and 2.5% for enforcement and grants related to safety and driver behavior. The bill also guarantees that annual increases in funding for each state will rise by at least 1% for each year covered by the authorization from a baseline increase of 17% above that provided in the last highway bill to at least 21% more than provided previously. The average increase provided in this legislation for all states is 31%.
$24 billion for special projects
In addition to setting funding levels for all federal primary and interstate highways, the bill also includes $24 billion in spending on 6,371 special projects requested by individual members of Congress. Almost every member of Congress earmarked funds for special projects including highways, bike trails, bus stops, parking lots, bridges, and many others. Only two members of Congress did not request and did not receive special funding. Both legislators are representatives from Arizona, and both voted against the final bill. In contrast to the huge number of projects specified in this most recent highway bill, the first Interstate highway authorization, passed during the Eisenhower administration, contained only two special funding requests.
In addition to highways and mass transit, special sections of the highway bill provide funding for a bridge in Alaska linking an island that contains an airport to the mainland, a deer avoidance system in rural New York, and, considering that Ronald Reagan once vetoed a highway bill that contained too much spending, landscaping on the Ronald Reagan Freeway northwest of Los Angeles. The bill also spends almost half a million dollars to rehabilitate a historic warehouse on the Erie Canal in New York and $3 million to control dust on rural roads in Arkansas. Proponents of the special projects claim that they provide additional jobs and improve quality of life in the affected communities.
Requesting special projects is a non-partisan activity that sometimes ignores political appearances. For instance, Alaska ranks as number 48 among the states in population, but it received more project funding than all but three other states; nor is being a Republican or Democrat a factor. James Oberstar, the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation committee, received $121 million in funding for 57 separate projects in his Minnesota district.
Positive provisions
Not all spending in the highway bill is coated in lard. Some, in fact, addresses real problems, such as the provision that directs the Secretary of Transportation to establish a pilot program to remedy the shortage of parking for commercial vehicles on the National Highway System. The bill spends $6.25 million per year for the whole six years of the authorization to improve access and availability to truck parking.
The bill directs the improvement of safety on the entire highway system, setting aside $5.1 billion for a safety program. It also provides an incentive to getting safety projects accomplished; states can spend up to 10% of their allocation on other projects if the state has met all its needs for safety improvement and for safer rail crossings. Rural roads come in for special attention with $90 million annually directed to high-risk highways.
To relieve the problems imposed by highway construction, the bill directs new business practices for highways to improve the speed of construction, safety during construction, reduction of congestion resulting from construction, and improved highway user satisfaction while projects are underway. These incentives can be up to 20% of project funding, but not more than $5 million per project and allows the money to be applied to the non-federal share in the cost of construction.
Hours of service left out
The American Trucking Associations has been quick to comment on what it sees as the benefits and failings of the bill. The primary objection from ATA is that the final bill does not include the disputed hours of service regulations as a matter of law, a proposal supported both by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the trucking association. Putting the rules for driver work and rest limits into law would have made challenges to those rules more difficult for the interest groups now opposing the standards in court. ATA President Bill Graves issued a statement that said, “While Congress included several initiatives that we believe will improve highway safety, we are disappointed that they failed to codify hours of service regulations as the Administration requested. We remain concerned that Congress' inaction on hours of service will negatively impact overall highway safety and force the revision of a rule that took eight years to write and is successfully serving its intended purpose.”
ATA also strongly objects to a provision in the bill that allows tolls on certain existing Interstate highways. The association says that tolls on public highways amount to double taxation of motor carriers and may encourage drivers to use nearby primary highways that do not charge tolls. The group says that diverting traffic to roads designed for lower capacity as a way to avoid tolls will cause potential safety problems.
On the positive side, ATA applauded a new source of funding for enforcement. The provision applies in all 50 states and is intended to enforce laws governing traffic violations by other motorists that take place in the immediate vicinity of large trucks. The new highway bill also makes owners of container chassis, in particular marine shipping lines and railroads, responsible for making sure that their equipment meets the current standards for highway operation.
Objection to surcharges
ATA objected to a proposal in the original bill that would have applied to a mandatory fuel surcharge to freight rates. The proposal did not survive into the final version, a situation that ATA says is an industry win, because application of such a surcharge would have increased the cost of all products shipped by truck.
The association says it was successful in revising the process for applying hazardous materials endorsements to the commercial driver license required for all drivers. The new bill directs the Transportation Security Administration to develop a system to notify carriers if drivers fail to meet security standards. It also directs TSA to implement new rules to eliminate duplicate federal background checks for drivers and to require drivers from Canada and Mexico to undergo background checks much like those required for US drivers.
While not expected to impact fuel prices at the pump in the near term, the energy bill contains several provisions that appear positive for trucking. It contains $100 million for fleet modernization and retrofit programs, $1 billion for diesel engine retrofits, and $94.5 million for heavy engine idle reduction technology. The idle reduction provision is expected to benefit the efforts to encourage use of auxiliary power units and truckstop electrification, both proposals by the SmartWay Transport Partnership run by the Environmental Protection Agency. The energy bill will fund half the cost of such equipment.
To encourage motor carriers to use auxiliary power units, the energy bill exempts the weight of such equipment from the maximum gross weight limit for heavy trucks.
The energy bill calls for more use of ethanol and biodiesel as a way to lower dependence on imported oil. However, the impact of the biodiesel provisions is expected to be regional with higher use of the fuel in agricultural areas where biodiesel is produced. Transporting biodiesel raises the costs above the cost of petroleum-based fuels. In addition, trucking interests express concerns about the energy content of biodiesel and question its cold weather performance characteristics.
