Road Backers Raise Concerns on Trust Fund Estimates

Industry officials pressing Congress and the White House to lock in long-term transportation spending programs say higher new estimates for the Highway Trust Fund may reduce pressure for legislators to act.

The Congressional Budget Office now thinks the fund could last all through the 2012 budget year before it would need new money to keep operating, at current rates of spending and likely levels of fee income.

It raises the risk that Congress, which was already stalled on how to craft a new multi-year surface transportation bill to replace and expand the one that expires Dec. 31, might find more justification in the CBO estimates for just extending current programs again.

At the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, spokesman Jeffrey Solsby said "the bottom line for us is that the market needs stability - for states, for firms, for suppliers - and kicking the can down the road, even a year or two, doesn't solve that challenge."

Construction firms "don't make hiring and purchasing decisions on a year's worth of work," said Solsby. "They make those decisions based on 5-7 years of work in the pipeline." So, he said, "the latest CBO numbers only reinforce what ARTBA has long said: The status quo cannot continue indefinitely. It is another reason why the highway/transit bill needs to be a priority."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has also urged the Obama team to get behind a new transportation bill and say how to fund it, while the administration says it will not support a fuel tax increase for transportation and has yet to offer promised "principles" for what a new bill should include.

Janet Kavinoky, the chamber's director of transportation infrastructure, said the CBO projections "have to also be considered in the context of stimulus money running out. There is still a hole to fill." She said federal officials should be pushing several actions, including new legislation on surface, air and water project investments. "Anything short of creating long-term certainty in the federal commitment to transportation infrastructure is going to be a disappointment," Kavinoky said.