[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 87 (Thursday, June 5, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3446-S3447]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE

  Mr. COONS. Mr. President, in my home State of Delaware today we have 
a problem. Just this week the critical I-495 bridge over the Christina 
River in Wilmington--which carries more than 90,000 drivers each and 
every day, north and south on this critical artery on the east coast of 
the United States--was closed indefinitely.
  While engineers and workers were on an unrelated project in the area, 
they noticed that four of the key pillars holding up the bridge were 
alarmingly slanted, causing widespread concerns about the bridge's 
safety and prompt action to shut it down.
  Now as the Delaware Department of Transportation and the Federal 
Highway Administration do everything they can to get to the bottom of 
this problem and to work to make this bridge safe again, tens of 
thousands of commuters are forced onto already crowded streets and 
highways, creating even worse traffic for everyone in our area, hurting 
our economy, and taking people away from where they need to be.
  It is, sadly, yet another example--one that hits particularly close 
to home for me--in a string of major infrastructure emergencies, some 
due to unforeseeable events, and some due to a long-term critical lack 
of investment that signifies why investment in our infrastructure is so 
important.
  Every day when Americans drive to work or drop off their kids at 
school, they make a simple bargain, an unconscious bargain with their 
government: They assume the roads will be safe to drive on. They expect 
that if they drive safely, they will be able to get to where they need 
to go in a reasonable amount of time.
  Unfortunately, it has been quite clear that while Americans keep 
doing what they can to move our Nation and our economy forward, we here 
in Congress aren't holding up our end of the bargain. We aren't meeting 
our responsibilities to invest in critical areas that we all know need 
work. We have a lot of infrastructure needs, but we simply aren't 
keeping up with them today.
  This is about the end of the school year for most families with kids 
in school around the country. Like many other parents, I was going over 
with my kids what they think their grades are at the end of the year. 
Well, the country also gets a grade. We get a grade from the American 
Society for Civil Engineers. These are the folks whose job it is to 
manage and supervise and survey the health and capabilities of our 
infrastructure--our bridges and roads and highways. This group, the 
American Society for Civil Engineers, gave our roadways a D.
  The Federal Highway Administration estimates that we are dramatically 
behind in investing in keeping our highways and bridges and tunnels up 
to speed. They say we need $170 billion more in capital investments 
every year to improve road conditions and performance.
  That group of civil engineers, the ASCE, has also determined a 
quarter of our bridges are functionally obsolete or structurally 
deficient. In little old Delaware, that comes to 175 bridges that fail 
to meet what we would all expect of our government--Federal and State 
and county and local governments--that we maintain bridges to the 
highest level of safety that we would expect.
  We will always face unforeseen crises and challenges, but this is one 
we can see coming. There may be hurricanes such as the great Superstorm 
Sandy that wiped out a lot of infrastructure in my region or there may 
be other unforeseeable events that impact our transportation 
infrastructure. But this one we have been seeing coming for years.
  This inconvenience in Delaware--the closing of the critical bridge on 
495 that has put so many at inconvenience--was nowhere near the biggest 
transportation disaster we have had in recent years. Just last year in 
Washington State, the Skagit River Bridge, built in 1955, literally 
collapsed after a truck drove into its framework. Seventy-one thousand 
drivers were using that bridge on a daily basis.
  I think many of us remember, way back in August of 2007, tragedy 
struck Minneapolis when its I-35 West Bridge, which extends over the 
Mississippi River, literally collapsed under the rush hour traffic 
weight. More than 100 cars were thrown into the water, 13 people lost 
their lives, and 145 were injured.
  If we don't act soon--together--we are going to face many more such 
tragic incidents like these. We have to address this problem and get 
over our unwillingness together to invest in infrastructure that we all 
depend on and value.
  The simple fact, as I have said, is current Federal investments are 
not keeping pace with our needs. We are, sadly, months away from 
exhausting the Federal highway trust fund--the trust fund that finances 
much of the highway, bridge, and tunnel work around the country on the 
Interstate Highway System--because the gas tax that funds it hasn't 
risen in 20 years, but the amount of gas being consumed and thus gas 
tax revenue generated has gone down. Yet we don't seem here to have the 
political will to implement a solution to this basic problem that folks 
have been saying is coming at us, hurtling like an oncoming truck for 
years.
  We talk a lot about our children--about the kind of world we want to 
leave them, about our hopes for the future, and it is just one of the 
reasons I am so concerned about our Nation's long-term balance sheet. 
Many of us talk about our Nation's deficits and our potentially 
crippling Federal debt. It is irresponsible of us to continue to rack 
up debt on our national balance sheet and leave it to our children and 
grandchildren. But I highlight today that when we neglect our 
transportation infrastructure--our highways and tunnels and roads and 
ports and bridges--these are things we use every single day in 
transporting our families and ourselves or goods to and from work or to 
and from home, to school, to soccer, to vacation. These are critical 
pieces of the American infrastructure. We are also racking up a huge 
debt there too. These investments have to be made one way or the other. 
I know we value these systems because we depend on them every day.
  So if we can't come together in the short term to fix the highway 
trust fund, I am left to wonder how we are going to come together on 
the much larger problem of meeting our broader infrastructure needs, of 
which that trust fund is one small but crucial part. We face short-
term, medium-term, and long-term problems. As I said, we have to fix 
this highway trust fund before it runs out of funding this summer. It 
is what often funds 80 percent of State highway work. It is a critical 
part of construction projects already scheduled to go on this summer. 
We have kept it funded by transferring money from the general fund for 
the last few years, but that is not how it is supposed to work. So we 
have got to come to terms with a solution that is responsible and meets 
this challenge.
  We have a range of options, but none of them are appealing: 
Increasing the gas tax, putting a surcharge on vehicles, charging for 
vehicle miles traveled. All of these are unappealing politically, but 
it is essential that we come up with something to solve this long-term 
problem.
  I thank Chairman Wyden of the Finance Committee, who is working hard 
with other members of that committee even today to find a path forward 
and a solution.

[[Page S3447]]

  Second, in the medium term, we have to reauthorize--we have to 
approve--ongoing work for highways, roads, and bridges, and we need to 
have a reauthorization for surface transportation by this fall. The 
Chair and ranking member of the relevant committee--Barbara Boxer of 
California and Dave Vitter of Louisiana--have shown, as has my senior 
Senator Tom Carper from Delaware, who also serves on this committee, 
that Federal infrastructure investment is a bipartisan value. They have 
been able to come out of that committee with bipartisan 
reauthorizations a number of times over the last couple of years, and 
that is encouraging to me.
  We also, a few minutes ago, came out of the transportation 
subcommittee markup on appropriations, the committee that says: Here is 
how much we will spend. That came out with a very strong bipartisan 
vote earlier today and will come to the floor in the next few months. 
This progress is encouraging, but it doesn't mean anything if we don't 
have a way to pay the bill when the bill comes due. We need to figure 
out how to finance infrastructure for the long term in this country.

  There are several bills with good ideas that have been put forward in 
this committee and in this Chamber. I have supported two bills. One is 
called the BRIDGE Act and the other is called the Partnership to Build 
America Act. These bills will provide the critical steps we need to 
bring private sector money in off the sidelines and facilitate a real 
partnership between government money and private sector money. These 
bills have been led by Senators Warner, Blunt, and Bennet, are 
genuinely bipartisan, and enjoy support from groups who often don't 
work well together--from industry to labor, from the AFL-CIO to the 
U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.
  There are several strong bipartisan bills that show the way forward, 
but we don't seem to be able to get them to the floor, get them 
approved, and get them moving forward.
  Right now, the truth is that the debate on this floor comes nowhere 
close to matching the reality of the scope of the problems in front of 
us. As I mentioned earlier, we have an enormous infrastructure debt. By 
2020--in just the next 6 years--it is estimated that our Nation will 
need $3.6 trillion of new infrastructure investment so we can fix and 
maintain our roads, bridges, rail, transit, drinking water, ports, 
sewers, wastewater treatment, and beyond. This is an enormous debt 
which is unpaid and for which we currently have no path forward.
  I know many of us who serve on the Budget Committee and pay attention 
to the balance sheet of our country are concerned about our structural 
national debt. I wanted to take a minute today--on a day when everyone 
in my hometown and home State is concerned about how we will tackle the 
problem of the I-495 bridge--and remind all of my colleagues of the 
scale of this national infrastructure debt.
  At the heart of this problem and at the heart of so many of the 
problems we have is our unwillingness to pay for what we want, to pay 
the bill that is long overdue for our long-overdue improvements to the 
infrastructure of this great country.
  Fixing this problem is going to take a great deal of revenue. We can 
reform taxes, we can involve the private sector, we can reprioritize 
funding, and we can reform the way government works. We don't lack for 
innovative ideas, but at the end of the day what we currently lack is 
our will.
  The people of the United States, through us, need to step up to the 
challenge of paying the bill. In my hometown, just in the last few 
hours and over the last few days, we have become more engaged in this 
debate than we have been in a long time because a bridge that is 
critical, a vital artery for our community, has stopped. It is closed 
indefinitely. We need to work together to find the resources to fix 
this bridge and get America moving together again. It is my hope and 
plea that my colleagues will step up to this challenge, which I know 
every community in our country faces.
  I thank the Presiding Officer.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Republican whip.

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