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Outgoing Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Jim Oberstar (D-MN) just wrapped up a roundtable conversation with reporters. He looked back on his 36 years in Congress – starting in January 1963 as clerk of the the Rivers and Harbors Committee, which eventually morphed into the T & I Committee.

He said the history of the committee – and his service to it – has been “the movement of people safely, efficiently, and effectively, for the betterment of the nation.”

He also imparted some final nuggets of wisdom for those who will follow him on the committee:

• Earmarks. Oberstar said a bill “devoid of the 27,000 earmarks like we had in 2006” would be a good thing. “That’s excess,” he said. But, he said, it was too simplistic to shut legislators out of the allocation process. “If you believe that, then the executive branch – at the national or state level – will make all those decisions.” He pointed to his own achievements in making the process more accountable and transparent.
• The reauthorization. He acknowledged that it was a “big hole in the legislative agenda.” He blamed the White House and the Senate for failing to come up with an agreement on a financing mechanism.
• An extension. He said that an answer on the length of the extension of the current authorization could come as early as tomorrow, when the newly elected House and Senate leadership meets. He even threw out the possibility that “if they come to some agreement, we could maybe even be doing a new authorization in the balance of this session. We’d be prepared to do that.” Assuming that won’t happen, however, he spoke strongly against doing short, month-to-month extensions as a forcing mechanism to “hold somebody’s feet to the fire.” He said that was not reasonable. He said if it wasn’t going to be a six-year bill, they should extend it for a year.

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Rep. Jim Oberstar said goodbye today after 36 years in the House, during which he helped pioneer federal support for biking and walking. “I go in peace of mind and heart, but with sadness,” he said in his concession speech.

He said he wouldn’t change or take back any of his votes for transportation, especially improvements in his own district. He refused to apologize for the stimulus, saying the infrastructure it paid for will be there for a hundred years.

Meanwhile, John Mica, the top Republican on the Transportation Committee – and its presumptive next chair – said in a statement:

If selected by my peers to chair the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the next Congress, my primary focus will be improving employment and expanding economic opportunities, doing more with less, cutting red tape and removing impediments to creating jobs, speeding up the process by which infrastructure projects are approved, and freeing up any infrastructure funding that’s been sitting idle.

Among my top legislative priorities will be passing a long-term federal highways and transit reauthorization… I will also focus on major initiatives to find ways within the Committee’s jurisdiction to save taxpayer dollars. That includes better management and utilization of federal assets, including real property, and more efficient, cost effective passenger rail transportation, including a better directed high-speed rail program.

Some reformers saw visions of high speed rail go down the toilet with the flip in Congressional power. Mica seems to indicate otherwise. Certainly, he’ll be under pressure from his party – which reads yesterday’s victory as a mandate for smaller government – to cut spending. But Mica supported Oberstar’s $500 billion transportation bill, and he recognizes the benefits of transit. He’ll need solid backup from advocates — speaking with a fiscal-conservative message — to convince his colleagues that infrastructure investment makes economic sense.

It looks like he’s prepared to try.

House infrastructure committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN), facing steep political odds
in his push to pass a new six-year federal transportation bill this
year, has begun to pitch an outside-the-box solution to the financing
shortfall that is still stalling congressional action: Treasury bonds.

Oberstar’s
proposal would plug the hole in anticipated highway trust fund revenue
for the next transport bill with top-rated Treasury debt securities.
Those bonds, the Minnesotan explained on Friday, would "be repaid with
revenues from the highway trust fund out into the future. And we would delay the repayment for the first perhaps four years, giving the economy time to recover."

In
order to repay the Treasury for its up-front bond issue, Congress would
ultimately need to raise the gas tax — a step lawmakers have been
unwilling to take since 1993, and one that the White House has ruled
out for the time being.

"The idea of waiting three or
four years for the economy to recover would be an appealing part of"
the idea, Iowa state DOT chief Nancy Richardson told Oberstar when he
sought her reaction to the plan at a Friday House hearing. "[That]
would allow it to appeal to some of the dissenters in
terms of increasing funding."

Delaying for
three or four years, however, also would assume that future Congresses
would be more open to voting on a gas-tax hike that few lawmakers are
eager to debate, even in rosy economic times. The evidence of success
for such kick-the-can-down-the-road moves is few and far between: both
parties, for example, have habitually voted to postpone previously scheduled cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors rather than fix the long-term formula.

In addition, the growing production boom in semi- and fully electric cars casts doubt
on the gas tax’s ability to raise sustainable revenue for
transportation going forward. Depending on how popular highly
fuel-efficient cars become by the time Congress considers a future gas
tax change, the cents-per-gallon increase needed to repay the Treasury
may be much higher than any current predictions.

The gas-tax bonding plan has a third potential hiccup.

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At an event in Minneapolis today, House transportation committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) announced his support for giving urban transit agencies more flexibility to spend federal transportation formula money on operating -- a change in the current law that has already won the backing of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood but has split the transit industry.

Oberstar appeared at an event marking Minneapolis' move to join the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), founded 14 years ago by then-New York City Transportation Commissioner Elliot Sander to counterbalance the influence of state DOTs'  voice in D.C., the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

Oberstar's specific remarks on transit operating aid were unavailable as of press time. But transport committee spokesman Jim Berard said the Minnesotan supported "in principle" the conept of allowing transit agencies from areas with populations greater than 200,000 to use their federal transportation formula grants on operating expenses.

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A contentious congressional dispute over
$932 million in transportation funding remains unresolved this week
after the Senate approved a one-month extension of federal aviation law
rather than a three-month version of the bill that included a fix to
the provision at issue.

House
transportation committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) had added
language to the three-month aviation measure redistributing the $932
million based on existing highway funding formulas — rather than
giving 58 percent of the money to four states by extending project
earmarks, as would occur under the jobs bill that President Obama signed 10 days ago.

Oberstar’s proposed fix also would amend
language in that jobs bill that disproportionately under-funded seven
federal transportation programs, including Safe Routes to School, Metropolitan Planning, and Recreational Trails.

Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had vowed to the House chairman that
upper chamber would approve his fix as part of a future jobs bill, but
objections from several senators prevented it from hitching a ride on
the aviation bill.

CQ identified one of the objecting senators in its story on the issue (sub. req’d.):

An
aide to Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., one of the
senators who whose state stands to lose under the Oberstar formulation,
said he was one of "a dozen or so" senators who had concerns.

"The last 11 FAA bills we’ve passed were clean, and a number
of members objected to adding a controversial highway change to that
bill," the aide said. "It’s an issue that needs to be addressed, but
this FAA [bill] simply wasn’t the place."

Republicans preferred Oberstar’s solution, in part because their states by and large would do better under his plan.

The sizable contingent of lawmakers backing Oberstar’s changes will get
their next shot at winning Senate passage in two weeks, after Congress
returns from its Easter recess. For more information on which states
would gain or lose in the reallocation of the $932 million, see this post from Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

Fixing a disputed provision in the jobs bill that President Obama signed into law yesterday -- as Senate Democratic leaders promised House transportation committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) following complaints by several members of his panel -- would involve the redistribution of $932 million in funding for two major federal road and rail programs.

The end result of the transfers would leave California with $192 million less than it had in the Senate-passed version of the jobs measure, while Texas would gain the most with an influx of more than $76 million, according to data released by Oberstar's committee earlier this week.

The $932 million in grants became an issue last month after the jobs bill, which extends the 2005 transportation law until 2011, cleared the Senate with language that also extended 2009-level earmarks for the two programs, known as Projects of Regional and National Significance (PRNS) and the National Corridor Infrastructure Improvement (NCIIP).

That extension of previous earmarks would result in 58 percent of the $932 million going to four states: Illinois, Louisiana, California, and Washington. After lawmakers from other states raised alarms about the distribution, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed to Oberstar [PDF] that if the House would approve the jobs bill without changing the provision, the Senate would move as quickly as possible on a fix.

"Although my preference would be to amend this [jobs bill] to reflect these compromises today, any further delays in enacting a surface transportation extension are unacceptable," Oberstar said two weeks ago, urging colleagues to take the upper chamber at its word.

The House passed legislation earlier this week that would redirect the $932 million to all 50 states based on existing road-funding formulas. It is that shift that would take PRNS and NCIIP money from California, Illinois ($119 million), Louisiana ($43 million), and Washington ($39 million), as well as Oregon ($29 million) and Virginia ($12 million).

States that would gain under the fix include Texas, Ohio ($25 million), Florida ($47 million), Georgia ($31 million), and New York ($16 million). It remains unclear when the Senate will act on the change.

The Senate today took its first steps towards voting on a new
long-term federal transportation bill, with environment committee
chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) vowing to take up a successor to the 2005 infrastructure law before 2011 and indicating she would use the House’s already-introduced version as a framework.

Boxer
described today’s hearing in her panel as "the kickoff" of the upper
chamber’s drafting of new legislation governing U.S. road, transit,
bridge, port, and rail policy. "Our intention is to hold a series of
hearings and write the bill while you are still here and while Senator [George] Voinovich [R-OH] is still here," she told Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), who will retire at the end of the year.

Such willingness to consider a new infrastructure bill before the Obama administration’s preferred timeframe
of next spring could help thaw the frosty relations between Boxer’s
panel and the House transportation committee, where chairman Jim
Oberstar (D-MN) has raged against upper-chamber inaction for months.

But
lawmakers and industry lobbies have a long way to go before they can
sing from the same hymnal on the next transportation bill. Boxer asked
representatives of the four lobbies appearing today — the American
Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA), the National Construction Alliance (NCA) and the Associated General Contractors (AGC) — to parse Oberstar’s bill "literally, with a pen" and let senators know which provisions they favored or disliked.

"We’re
going to take their bill and work from it," Boxer said of the House,
which has proposed a $500 billion plan that streamlines 108 categories
of formula-based federal transportation spending into four and includes
dedicated funding for metropolitan area priorities.

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In the years before partisan warfare became the norm in Washington,
transportation tended to unite both ends of the ideological spectrum.
Can rationality return to infrastructure policy debates that have
become subsumed by culture clashes between cyclists and drivers,
urbanists and suburbanites — and, of course, Democrats and Republicans?

That
question brought House transportation committee chairman Jim Oberstar
(D-MN) to a small meeting room on Capitol Hill today as conservative
transit advocate Bill Lind engaged assistant transportation secretary Polly Trottenberg, Reconnecting America president John Robert Smith, and urban developer Chris Leinberger in a spirited debate.

Lind focused on the themes of Moving Minds,
a book he co-wrote with the late conservative icon Paul Weyrich to
debunk many of the anti-transit, pro-roads myths trotted out by Randal O’Toole, Wendell Cox, and other pundits on the right.

"The
way we got to America’s national motto being ‘drive or die’ … is not
because of any sort of free market," Lind said today. "We got here
because of massive government subsidization of one competitor and the taxing of another."

But
the dialogue got interesting when Oberstar arrived, a cast on his arm
after taking a spill on a sheet of ice. He shared an anecdote about
former French President Charles de Gaulle’s support for rail before
hitting a familiar note, one best described as respectfully critical of
the Obama administration.

"Political will
– that’s what we’re lacking today and have been lacking for a long
time," Oberstar said, urging fellow policymakers "to reinvest in a
system that moves great numbers of people at the lowest cost."

In
a direct communication to Trottenberg, the White House’s representative
in the room, he added that he stands ready to take up a new federal
transportation bill "whenever this administration can find its
political will to support a financing mechanism."

Trottenberg
took the floor next, acknowledging "frustration" on the part of U.S.
DOT staff as they seek to build political support for the difficult
choices needed to raise revenue for large-scale reform.

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The Associated Press published a piece today that, after putting "economists and statisticians" to work on analyzing $21 billion in federal stimulus money for transportation, reached a volatile conclusion:

Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama's argument that more road money would address an "urgent need to accelerate job growth."

The very idea of measuring the immediate effects of transportation stimulus spending on joblessness is highly dubious, for two reasons underscored by the U.S. DOT's quickly blogged pushback to the AP story.

Firstly, for all the White House's talk of "shovel-readiness," the need to put transport projects out to bid, sign contracts, and hire workers means that stimulus dollars take some time to affect broader local economies. The latest congressional data shows that work has started on 57 percent, or $19.7 billion, of the stimulus law's $34.3 billion in road and transit funding.

Ironically, that ripple effect for transport spending could end up helping states, such as Florida, that were slow out of the gate in allocating stimulus money but continue to struggle with high unemployment.

Secondly (despite the best efforts of some senior Democrats) transportation only accounted for 6 percent of the stimulus' $787 billion in total spending. Why expect such a small slice of the legislation to have a major impact on unemployment rates? House transport committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) and his top lieutenant, Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-OR) today compared the AP's assumptions to "saying it is a waste of time to feed a homeless family because that one act does not cure poverty."

Also from Oberstar and DeFazio's rebuttal to the AP:

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