[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 130 (Thursday, September 19, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Page S11044]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  FISCAL YEAR 1997 TRANSPORTATION APPROPRIATIONS--HIGHWAY OBLIGATION 
                               AUTHORITY

 Mr. D'AMATO. Mr. President, the Senate completed action on the 
conference report for the Department of Transportation and related 
agencies appropriations bill yesterday, voting out the legislation 85 
to 14. That bill, H.R. 3675, contained funding for the various 
transportation programs that this Nation undertakes--aviation, Coast 
Guard, highways, railroads, and transit. All in all, H.R. 3675 is a 
good bill for the United States and for the State of New York. However, 
Mr. President, as occurs in most pieces of legislation, it is not 
entirely perfect. In this respect, I must raise issue with a provision 
that was contained in the final version of this bill that will have 
serious adverse consequences on the State of New York.
  When we considered this bill on the Senate floor in July, an 
amendment was debated and ultimately adopted that would require the 
Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of the Treasury to 
investigate and report back to the Congress on the impact of and need 
to remedy an accounting error that was made in 1994 with respect to the 
crediting of receipts to the Highway Trust Fund. If uncorrected, this 
error had the potential to change the Federal highway obligation 
authority in a manner that would reconfigure highway funding for a 
number of States, allocating more dollars to States where the dollars 
were not supposed to go and away from States where the dollars were 
supposed to be allocated. The amendment that passed in the Senate 
corrected this error.
  During the conference with the House of Representatives, this 
provision was not supported by a majority of conferees and was 
subsequently dropped. Even efforts to hold States harmless for the 
coming fiscal year because of this error were not agreed upon. Because 
of this, we are back where we started before the adoption of the 
amendment, with this accounting glitch in place and certain States in 
our Nation facing the denial of funding they deserve.
  Unfortunately, New York is one of those States that will be denied 
its rightful amount of highway funding. The calculations that I have 
seen indicate that this uncorrected error will cost New York more than 
$100 million in Federal highway dollars that it should rightfully 
receive. This is not a small amount of money by any stretch. It is 
roughly 11 percent of the total highway funding New York should receive 
in the coming fiscal year. However, because of this accounting error, 
and because efforts to correct this error were not agreed upon in 
conference, those who travel New York's roadways will bear the brunt of 
this 11-percent cut.
  It would be an understatement to say that I am displeased that this 
simple error was not able to be corrected in order to prevent any 
adverse impact on highway users in New York. However, the members of 
the conference committee were not inclined to accept the Senate 
amendment. While I do not agree with the decision by the conferees it 
is by no means an issue that has been solved.
  In 1997, the Congress will be facing a multitude of issues involving 
the reauthorization of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency 
Act [ISTEA]. Issues involving funding allocations for the individual 
States will most assuredly be heavily discussed in the course of 
negotiations over any reauthorization bill. Perhaps this particular 
issue may need to be revisited in the context of that reauthorization. 
In the meantime, it still demands the attention and the action of the 
administration. Therefore, I intend to work with my colleagues whose 
States are similarly impacted as New York in an effort to remedy this 
Treasury Department accounting error.

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