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Pass long-term bipartisan highway bill, senator urges.
WASHINGTON
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has called for a long-term bipartisan extension of a federal highway funding bill to maintain the nation’s roads and bridges and thereby enable this country to maintain its world economic leadership.
A 60-day extension of the bill that supports the federal Highway Trust Fund will expire July 31.
Unless the federal transportation bill is reauthorized, Brown said critical Ohio road and bridge repairs will be postponed, and thousands of construction jobs will be jeopardized.
“To remain on top of the world’s economy, we need to invest in a world-class infrastructure,” the senator said during a Wednesday media conference call.
“If we want to continue our leadership, we have to invest in a long-term transportation plan,” he said, invoking both economic and patriotic appeals for Congress to invest in infrastructure.
The United States, which built a world-class interstate highway system decades ago, has gone from first place to 16th place in the world in infrastructure quality based on World Economic Forum rankings, Brown said.
Brown’s office said some 6,532 of Ohio’s 26,986 bridges have been deemed either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete by the Federal Highway Administration.
In Mahoning County, 131 of 352 bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. In Trumbull County, the figures are 141 out of 399; and in Columbiana County, the numbers are 86 out of 326.
More than 40 percent of Ohio’s roads are in mediocre or poor condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, Brown’s aides said.
Infrastructure improvements are economically important because they put people to work in the construction trades and enable businesses to transport their products to market more efficiently, Brown said.
In a meeting earlier this month with The Vindicator’s editorial board, Brown called for raising the federal tax on gasoline and diesel fuel that supports the Highway Trust Fund, but he said that increase should be coupled with payroll tax breaks for middle-income workers.
The federal fuel tax – 18.4 cents a gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents a gallon on diesel fuel – hasn’t risen since 1993.
“All options need to be on the table, but we need to fund it,” Brown said of the Highway Trust Fund during the conference call.
Despite the need for transportation improvement projects, local communities are reluctant to spend money to design new projects because of uncertainty as to when Congress will make a long-term commitment to finance the Highway Trust Fund that helps pay for these projects, said John Getchy, executive director of the Eastgate Regional Council of Governments.
Eastgate is the metropolitan planning agency for Mahoning and Trumbull counties.
“If communities aren’t guaranteed money down the road to build projects, they’re not going to take their money now and design them,” Getchy said during a Tuesday interview.
“Youngstown doesn’t have money to just design projects and put them on the shelf and wait for federal funding,” he observed.
“It all takes money, so, if Congress would pass the highway legislation, we’d be better off.”