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The critical multi-year transportation bill, which lawmakers have sidelined since last summer as they’ve quarreled about how to pay for it, looks to be back on the agenda after President Obama’s pugnacious Labor Day speech, in which he called on Congress to ramp up investment in transportation. The broad outline of Obama’s plan calls for rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, constructing 4,000 miles of rail, and rehabilitating 150 miles of runway over the next six years.

While that may look like a lot of road spending compared to rail, transportation reformers see cause for optimism in the use of the word “rebuild” — which implies that the emphasis will be on fixing existing roads instead of constructing sprawl-inducing new highways. The outline also calls for “significant new funding” for the creation of new transit projects, and for ramping up investment in “safety, environmental sustainability, economic competitiveness, and livability.” Those criteria have all been hallmarks of the US DOT’s TIGER program, which distributes competitive grants to local transportation agencies from what has been a relatively small pot of money.

Congress typically authorizes a major transportation spending bill every six years, but political gridlock over raising the gas tax or securing other funding streams has stalled the reauthorization of the bill since it expired in 2009. In the interim, lawmakers have passed a series of stopgap spending measures to keep the transportation system functioning, even as Jim Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has lobbied hard for Congress to take up the full bill.

Monday’s proposal represents the first serious effort from the President to tackle America’s transportation policy inertia, which is preventing any significant progress from the highway-oriented status quo. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are undoubtedly eager to pass a bill that will show voters they’re doing as much as possible to address high unemployment, which is making a Republican rout in the mid-term elections look increasingly likely.

Predictably, the GOP does not look willing to lend a hand. Republicans have already lined up against Obama’s proposal, and another protracted and nasty fight over a major White House initiative looks likely. Immediately after the announcement, House Minority Leader John Boehner released a statement opposing the plan, and on Tuesday he released another one calling the plan an “exercise in futility.”

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President Obama did triple duty last night for the re-election campaign of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), visiting three fundraisers to send a stark message about polls that show the environment committee chairman holding a single-digit lead against her GOP challengers despite a formidable cash advantage.

In
remarks from one appearance that were released by the White House,
Obama touted Boxer’s "work to pursue a clean energy future" by helping
to craft a climate change bill in the upper chamber — albeit one that was effectively supplanted by a non-cap-and-trade measure crafted by three other senators.

"California has been a leader in promoting hybrids and cleaner burning
fuels," Obama told the crowd, "and appropriately, you have in Barbara Boxer a subcompact
senator with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy."

But
that energy may not be enough to propel Boxer to victory without a
tangible win to tout for recession-weary Californians, as E&E News
reported this morning. From its subscription-only writeup of the
Obama-Boxer fundraising swing:

Shaun Bowler, a professor at University of California, Riverside, said
Boxer has three factors to blame for the uphill fight: an
anti-incumbent mood throughout the country; Attorney General Jerry
Brown’s (D) lackluster campaign for governor; and Obama’s sagging
approval ratings. …

To Bowler, Boxer needs to show evidence of a major victory before the
fall, but he is unconvinced that a climate bill would resonate with
voters.

Cue Antonio Villaraigosa?

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Yesterday brought news of two grim transportation numbers from the Obama administration: 2 and $53 million.

The first figure is the percentage of federal transport stimulus contracts that have gone to disadvantaged and minority-owned businesses, according to the U.S. DOT. The 2-percent figure was released this afternoon by the Transportation Equity Network (TEN), which included government emails verifying its data.

In real dollar terms, that 2 percent comes out to $986 million of the stimulus law's $48 billion in total transportation spending. The low total for disadvantaged and minority firms, known by the shorthand of DBEs, comes five months after Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced a $20 million bonding program aimed at helping less well-connected companies compete for federal business.

"This number is absolutely shocking," TEN executive director Laura Barrett said in a statement. "Secretary LaHood is encouraging state DOTs to increase allocations to minority and disadvantaged contractors, but this number proves that encouragement is not enough. The old boys network that locks out minority contractors was built on the state and local level, and it needs to be fought at that level to reverse this outrageous inequity."

Anecdotal reports of minority contractors getting shortchanged by transportation stimulus spending have emerged in Illinois, Minnesota, and California, among other states. The 2005 federal transportation law states that at least 10 percent of federal roads and transit spending should be routed through DBEs, unless the Transport Secretary determines otherwise.

The second not-so-great transportation number, $53 million, reflects the total spending on pollution-reducing transit grants that the White House included in its budget proposal for fiscal year 2011.

The administration hopes to steer nearly 10 times that amount, or nearly $530 million, to its new three-agency partnership for sustainable communities. Still, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) pulled out the $53 million number today to note that the White House had proposed $22 million more for the same type of transit grants last year (and ended up spending $100 million).

From the EESI's budget statement (emphasis theirs):

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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said today that he sees "very bright" prospects for congressional approval of the Obama administration's $4 billion National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, the new iteration of the long-discussed National Infrastructure Bank proposal.

"There is a great deal of interest in this concept in the Senate," LaHood told reporters during a wide-ranging discussion of the White House's transport budget for the fiscal year that begins in October.

Asked about resolving any differences between the administration's Fund plan and a more bank-like entity envisioned by senior lawmakers, LaHood emphasized his openness to cooperation: "The idea is that we'd work with Congress on their ideas."

LaHood also noted that the U.S. DOT's $78.8 billion budget request for 2011, which marks a 2 percent increase from last year's levels, includes $50 million in grants for an issue that he has turned into a personal signature for him -- cracking down on distracted driving.

One topic of particular interest was the White House's continued assumption of transfers from the general Treasury to the highway trust fund (HTF) pending enactment of a new long-term federal transportation bill. As the federal gas tax, last raised in 1993, remains static and lawmakers decline to discuss an alternative funding source, the presidential budget document projects that the HTF would need more than $11 billion to make it through the current fiscal year.

LaHood told reporters that while "we've gone along with the short-term extensions" of the 2005 federal transport law, the most recent of which expires at the end of this month, the White House has always sought to postpone the next bill until 2011.

"The biggest dilemma for all of us is finding $400 [billion] to $500 billion, given that the highway trust fund is insufficient to fund all the things we want to do," the former House Republican added.

The uncertain status of future HTF infusions prompted one reporter to ask whether transportation spending would be subject to the president's proposed three-year freeze on discretionary accounts. (Indeed, today's budget includes a chart projecting that long-term transit funding would remain flat.) Chris Bertram, the U.S. DOT's chief financial officer, said the budget's funding levels should be considered "placeholder, rather than frozen."

When it comes to re-centering the Washington bureaucracy to better
accommodate cities’ needs, the first year of the Obama administration
has brought its share of progress (a three-agency partnership set to spend $150 million on sustainable development) and hiccups (a White House urban affairs office with lots of talk but little action).

Now
the next milestone is the White House’s 2011 budget proposal, set to
hit the streets early next month. And in his speech to the U.S.
Conference of Mayors yesterday, the president vowed that metropolitan
areas would get their fair share of attention. Obama outlined three
goals in his speech:

First, we’ll build strong, regional backbones for our economy by
coordinating federal investment in economic and workforce development,
because today’s metropolitan areas don’t stop at downtown. What’s good
for Denver, for example, is usually good for places like Aurora and
Boulder, too. Strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions,
and strong regions are essential for a strong America.

Second on the White House’s list: beefing up funding for the
sustainable communities alliance struck by the Environmental Protection
Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and U.S.
DOT. "We need strategies
that encourage smart development linked to quality public transportation that bring our communities together," Obama said, echoing his Transportation Secretary’s push for more competitive TIGER transportation grant money this year.

Obama described the third plank in his urban agenda as "creating neighborhoods of opportunity":

Many
of our neighborhoods have been economically distressed long before
this crisis hit, for as long as many of us can remember. And while the
underlying causes may be deeply rooted and complicated, there are some
needs that are simple: access to good jobs, affordable housing,
convenient transportation that connects both, quality schools and
health services, safe streets and parks, and access to a fresh, healthy
food supply.

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When President Obama signed an executive order in October requiring federal agencies to craft strategies for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, he described the mandate as Washington "lead[ing] by example" on the pollution-reduction front.

And that's true -- but the order also includes language telling federal agencies to get involved in integrating local transportation planning, with a particular focus on selecting sites for government facilities

that are pedestrian-friendly, near existing employment centers, and accessible to public transit, and emphasize existing central cities and, in rural communities, existing or planned town centers;

The overall goal for government agencies, as Obama's order put it, should be to "strengthen the vitality and livability of the communities in which federal facilities are located." Given that more than 2,200 communities host federally owned or leased property, that edict could unleash a lot of local energy for transit and pedestrian improvements.

The order also gives federal agencies eight months to craft long-term sustainability plans focusing on how to implement "strategies and accommodations for transit, travel, training, and conferencing that actively support lower-carbon commuting and travel by agency staff." The White House budget office and Council on Environmental Quality are charged with vetting each agency's proposal.

And as each agency devises those emissions-cutting plans, the Obama administration's push to consider sustainability as a transportation, housing, and environmental issue is given a meaty role in the process.

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During last month's White House jobs summit, President Obama carved out some common ground with critics of his first stimulus law's $47 billion in infrastructure spending -- which was distributed mainly by the book through state DOTs. "The term "shovel-ready," let’s be honest here, doesn’t always live up to its billing," he acknowledged.

Now, as the Senate mulls its response to the House jobs bill that included $27.5 billion for highways and $8.4 billion for transit, the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is echoing some of Obama's concerns.

In a report released Thursday, the Capitol budgeteers concluded that most of the economic benefits of sending more transportation aid to states would not be felt until 2011 at the earliest.

The "large-scale construction projects" that could fundamentally reshape local infrastructure tend to take years before their impact is felt on the economy, the CBO noted:

[F]or example, building new transportation infrastructure that requires establishing new rights-of-way and developing and implementing alternative energy sources would probably have their biggest effects on output and employment after the recovery was well along. As a practical matter, the experience with [the first stimulus] suggests that fewer projects are “shovel ready” than one might expect ...

Moreover, given the substantial increase in infrastructure funding provided by [the first stimulus], achieving significant increases in outlays above the amounts funded by [the first stimulus] would probably take even longer. Thus, most of the increases in output and employment from this option would probably occur after 2011.

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The annual powwow of thousands of transportation workers, planners,
and wonks that’s known as the Transportation Research Board (TRB) conference
kicked off in the capital yesterday with a candid admission from some
senior U.S. DOT officials: reorienting American transport planning to
accommodate the overlap with housing and environmental sustainability
is proving pretty difficult.

The
subscription-only ClimateWire news service caught remarks from Beth
Osborne, the Obama team’s deputy assistant secretary for transportation
policy, who said the administration’s livability work has been slowed by laws that impede federal participation in local planning:

"A lot of it [is] the disjointed federal programs that
often discourage and certainly do not incentivize the coordination of
housing policy and transportation policy, water infrastructure policy,
economic development policy," she said.

"In fact, within the
transportation program, we really disincentivize this," she said. A
state that improves traffic flow and transit use will burn less
gasoline, meaning it will lose revenue from its main source of
transport funding — the gas tax. "That state that creates greater
efficiency can see their own budget get slashed as a reward."

This tension between the desire to cut transportation emissions and the
nation’s reliance on the gas tax for the majority of its transport
funding is a familiar one for Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and other
urban members of Congress.

Nadler lamented
back in June that many states were insisting on a guaranteed rate of
return from their gas-tax revenue based on a nonsensical "equity
argument" that says: "The more energy-efficient you are, the less gas
you use, the less [federal] funding you should get."

One key
ingredient in the Obama administration’s effort to carve out a stronger
federal role in local planning, of course, is the still-stalled
six-year federal transportation bill. And Osborne — seemingly aware of
the value of that legislation in removing longstanding obstacles to
coordination — told the TRB meeting that "Capitol Hill has asked DOT
to craft its own version of a transportation reauthorization bill,"
according to ClimateWire.

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