[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16181-16183]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1930
                CHAOS IN AMERICA'S INFRASTRUCTURE SYSTEM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. LaHood). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 2015, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Garamendi) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, this is chaos week in Washington, and 
there are a lot of things going on. Most people want to talk about 
Benghazi or--I don't know--maybe the Speaker, the next Speaker or the 
last Speaker. However, what I would like to talk about today is chaos 
in America's infrastructure system.
  Early this morning on my way to the airport in Sacramento I was 
driving up Interstate 5, the highway that connects Mexico and Canada 
and Oregon and Washington and California. I hit a huge pothole and then 
another pothole. It turns out that the entire right lane was a series 
of potholes for the 9 miles that I traveled to get to the airport. That 
is not unusual, but that is the story of America's infrastructure.
  Everybody here on the floor wants to talk about how our great Nation 
is the world's most vibrant economy, the place where intellectual 
infrastructure takes place, but it certainly is not the place where 
physical infrastructure takes place. We rank 16th among the developed 
nations in the world on our infrastructure.
  Travel to China. High-speed rail is going every which way. They have 
new airports. I remember the comment of our Vice President when he flew 
into LaGuardia in New York City. It wasn't very complimentary.
  We have a need to build the infrastructure of this Nation because it 
is upon the infrastructure that the economy grows. It is upon the 
highways that we travel and move the goods and services. It is upon the 
transit system that more than 45 percent of Americans depend on for 
their transportation.
  We have got problems. I was reminded of Apollo 13 and that very 
famous quote coming back from space: ``Houston, we've had a problem 
here.'' Yep. America, we have got problems.
  That is a picture of the bridge on Interstate 5 in Washington State. 
Just a little bit north of this bridge is the Canadian border. This 
bridge collapsed about 3 years ago. There are 63,500 bridges in America 
that are deficient, and over the last decade we have seen Americans die 
on bridges that have collapsed. We have got a problem.
  Among other things, given all the chaos here in Washington, we have 
got a problem with infrastructure. The House of Representatives is 
going to take up an infrastructure bill this week in committee. We will 
talk about that a little later.
  First I want to go through some of the other problems besides bridges 
and highways. Oh, by the way, it would take $780 billion to bring our 
highways up to adequate standards. That is a lot of money. Or maybe it 
is not. That is about three-quarters of what we have spent in 
Afghanistan over the last 14 years. I guess we make decisions here 
about where we spend money.
  Forty-two percent of our highways are in inadequate condition, and 
congestion abounds in 42 percent of the urban highways. Yep, we have 
got problems, but we can solve them. We will see whether the House of 
Representatives and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure 
is willing to solve the problems this week when we take up the 
infrastructure bill here in the House of Representatives.
  I would like to have my colleague from California, Representative 
Janice Hahn, address one of our other problems. It is a problem that 
she is particularly aware of. She represents the greatest port in 
America, the Port of Los Angeles, and its neighboring port, the Port of 
Long Beach.
  Representative Hahn.
  Ms. HAHN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my good colleague from 
California, Mr. Garamendi, for devoting this Special Order hour to the 
needs that we have in this country when it comes to our infrastructure.
  I am sort of excited because this week, at long last, barely in time 
before the highway trust fund runs out of money, we are finally going 
to look at a long-term surface transportation bill to fund some of our 
Nation's most critical infrastructure, which you have been talking 
about.
  Our Nation's highways, our roads, our bridges, they have been 
neglected far too long. Today we unfortunately have an infrastructure 
crisis. Not only do the American people rely on these roads to get from 
point A to point B safely and efficiently, our economy relies on them 
as well.
  I have been advocating, as you know, for more funding for our freight 
network. That is the series of highways and roads that go from our 
ports and our manufacturing hubs and that the vast majority of our 
Nation's freight travel on. Our Nation's ports are hard at work, 
bringing in cargo from all over the world and exporting the products of 
American manufacturing to the growing overseas market.
  Twenty-two million jobs nationwide rely on the efficient movement of 
goods in and out of our ports. These jobs rely on our Nation's freight 
network. For too long we have failed to invest in this important 
infrastructure and allowed it to crumble. Too many bridges along the 
freight network are in disrepair, and too many of our highways are 
unable to handle the modern levels of traffic.
  Now, many of us deal with the inconvenience of traffic every day, but 
this same traffic also costs both businesses and consumers money, and 
it threatens our economy's ability to stay competitive in the 21st 
century global economy.
  As the roads on our freight network become more and more unreliable, 
the cost of transporting these goods increases, and American 
manufacturers and consumers pay the price. That is why I proposed 
legislation that would drastically increase the funding of this freight 
network infrastructure.
  I thought it would be a good idea, and my bill would have used 
existing customs fees to provide $2 billion every year just to fund 
this freight network and the infrastructure projects without, by the 
way, raising any taxes. I thought, by investing in our freight network, 
we could give American businesses and manufacturers a competitive edge 
and spur job creation across the country.
  The highway bill that we are considering this week provides just $750 
million per year in freight funding. That is less than half of what I 
was hoping for. But it is a start. I hope that we can continue this 
conversation and find ways to invest in our ports and in this freight 
network at the level that our economy needs.
  I hope that in coming days we can work in a bipartisan way to improve 
the highway bill and ensure that it passes before the end of this year. 
I would like to see the freight network expanded to include that last 
mile. Those are the roads that connect everything to our ports with 
highways and with rail. And when we talk about improving our roads, 
these last mile roads are often forgotten, even when they have the 
greatest amount of traffic.
  I hope that we can expand the freight title to include funding for 
on-dock rail at our ports. Investing in on-dock rail would actually 
ease traffic on our highways by taking a lot of those trucks off the 
roads. That cargo would come off the ships, go right onto the rail and 
then to the end consumer.
  This bill is a positive step. It is not perfect. It is not as good as 
I would like to have seen, but it is the right step for a long-term 
plan to invest in our Nation's critical infrastructure.
  I am looking forward to working with you, Mr. Garamendi. Thank you 
for your leadership on this. Thank you for talking about why Make It In 
America makes sense. But none of that makes sense unless we can finally 
invest in this infrastructure in this country to, as you said, make 
this country great and make it work for everyone.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Representative Hahn, your leadership on the port 
issues is well known. You head up the PORTS Caucus here in the House of 
Representatives. You are constantly badgering all of us about the 
necessity of the ports being expanded.

[[Page 16182]]

  We know the Eastern ports are facing the challenge of providing 
access for the Panamax ships, bigger ships being able to go through the 
Panama Canal. As you have told us so many times, we need to improve the 
infrastructure on the West Coast for the efficiency so that we can keep 
those Panamax ships on the West Coast.
  The freight issue that you talked about so eloquently here is 
absolutely on. It is the major part of the American transportation 
economy. We look at roads, we look at railroads, but the notion of 
combining this into a comprehensive strategy in which we talk about the 
movement of goods, the freight movement.
  Your leadership is very, very important. I thank you so very much for 
joining us. I know that you have a tight schedule for the evening, but 
you broke away to bring us the very, very important message.
  I want to continue on here really with the ports. The American 
Society of Civil Engineers does a report card on the American 
infrastructure. We would fail. We would have to go back to remedial 
classes if their report card was somehow the way in which we would 
judge the work of the United States Congress because, with regard to 
ports, as we just discussed, it is a C, even though progress has been 
made.
  To meet the needs of the ports, we are going to have to spend an 
additional $46 billion over and above what is already programmed. We 
are going to have to spend $748 billion in the future in order to meet 
the needs of the highways, and that just gets us out of the D rating 
provided by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
  For transit, it is also a D. As I said earlier, some one-half of 
American households depend upon transit because they don't have a car, 
and 45 percent of the urban passengers cannot get the services that 
they need from transit.
  It goes on and on and on. Bridges, a C-plus. As I said earlier, 
63,500 bridges are inadequate. For the rail system, part of what 
Congresswoman Hahn was talking about, the railroads have invested over 
$75 billion of their own money improving their systems, but the 
intermodal programs that are so necessary require that those rails 
connect to the highways, to the trucking industry, and that hasn't been 
done. So the rails actually receive a C-plus ranking.
  We have got work to do here. We have got some very, very serious 
problems. Let me just put this up because there are solutions available 
to us.
  If we take a look at the problem, in this case, the global assessment 
of the United States is 16th for transportation infrastructure. The 
solution? Invest. For every dollar that we invest, the economy grows by 
$3.54. So when you put a dollar in, suddenly you get the economy 
moving. People go to work.
  For every billion dollars that we invest in roads and bridges, we are 
going to create 21,671 jobs. Those are people that are getting good, 
high-quality, high-paying, middle-income jobs. Guess what. They are 
going to pay taxes. So you invest a dollar and you get back $3.54 of 
economic activity. And you get tax growth, not new taxes, but new 
people paying taxes.
  That is what we want. We want people to go to work. We want jobs in 
America. We find that, if we invest in infrastructure, we have got the 
opportunity to create jobs, to increase the tax base, and grow the 
economy.
  Now, on the negative side, underinvesting in infrastructure costs 
America over 900,000 jobs, including 97,000 jobs in manufacturing. 
These things go together. We have fortunately had over the years a buy-
America requirement in the infrastructure financing for highways and 
bridges and the rest and for transit, that your tax dollars, my tax 
dollars, all of our tax dollars, are required to be used to buy 
American-made goods, equipment, services, buses, and the like.
  Unfortunately, it is only 50 percent. So a transit agency can take 
your tax money and spend 50 percent of that tax money on buying a bus 
or a train from China, and the other 50 percent presumably would have 
to be spent on American-made services and goods.

                              {time}  1945

  Not good enough. I think it ought to be 99 percent. Why not use our 
tax money to buy American?
  So these are the opportunities and the problems that we have 
available to us, and that is the large outsourcing that I just talked 
about.
  And the solution? Make It In America. I have talked about that for 5 
years here on the floor. Build the American economy with Make It In 
America laws and regulations. Use our tax money to buy American-made 
goods and equipment.
  Here is what it means. Let me give you a couple of examples of the 
good news and the bad news. Here is why Make It In America strategies 
are important.
  The bad news is California, my home State, where we had to rebuild 
the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, spanning from Oakland to the 
peninsula, San Francisco. It fell down during the '89 earthquake, and 
then we decided we had to rebuild it.
  Well, you know, it takes a long time to figure out how to build it 
and what it is going to look like. It took forever. However, it was a 
multibillion-dollar project; and someone decided that it would be 
cheaper to buy Chinese steel than American steel, so they contracted 
with a Chinese steel company. The result was 3,000 jobs in China, a 
brand-new steel mill to manufacture the most high-quality steel. And 
what the Chinese sent to America was deficient. The welds were 
insufficient. There were problems in the quality of the steel.
  The result was, at least part of that problem was, some $3.5 billion 
overrun. That is the bad news. California really screwed up. We say, 
``Make it in America.''
  Guess what happened on the other side of the continent? New York 
needed to rebuild a new bridge, the New York Tappan Zee Bridge. It was 
made with United States manufactured steel; total cost, $3.9 billion, 
7,728 American jobs because they undertook a buy America requirement, 
and they bought it in America; on time, under budget. The Tappan Zee 
Bridge, good; the San Francisco Bay Bridge, bad.
  Make it in America, buy American, that ought to be our policy.
  I want to move on to where we are this week. On October 29, the 
United States Congress will engage in its favorite game: kicking the 
can down the road.
  We will take up a transportation and infrastructure bill in the House 
of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this 
week. Good for us. Several months late, not in time for next week's 
deadline. So we will kick the can down the road. We will give ourselves 
another couple of months to ponder how we can address the needs of 
America's infrastructure.
  I want to suggest to you there is a way we can do it. I put this 
chart up to challenge all of us. This chart displays the opportunity as 
well as the potential for the missed opportunity.
  There are three new infrastructure pieces of legislation that are 
floating around the United States Capitol. But before we go to those 
three, I want to call your attention to where we are today.
  Highway funding, this is today's highway funding. We are spending 
somewhere around $264 billion on highways, $64.2 billion on transit. 
The entire amount over a 6-year period of time--this is 6 years--is 
$319 billion. This does not include the rail system.
  So $319 billion is what we are spending today over a 6-year period of 
time. I have already said how inadequate that is. I won't go back 
through that again.
  Now, the administration proposed but, frankly, never pushed, never 
put any weight behind it and, I think, copped out on what is, in my 
view, a very, very good bill, a comprehensive bill that included rail 
transit--again, not included here. It was a bill that had $449 billion, 
not including the rail, over a 6-year period, compared to the $319 
billion that we are spending today. That amounts to, what, $120 billion 
a year more--actually, $130 billion a year more.

[[Page 16183]]

  That is good. That is what we need. I misquoted that. It is $130 
billion over 6 years. That is the kind of money that we need to build 
the infrastructure.
  Highways, $317 billion, over 6 years, compared to where we are today, 
$246 billion. Significant increase, enough to fix the potholes on I-5. 
Transit, $114.6 billion over 6 years, compared to today, $64 billion 
over 6 years. The entire sum, $449 billion, compared to $319 billion 
over 6 years.
  That is the kind of progress that we can and must make if we want to 
move from 16th among the world's economies, developed economies, to get 
back up into the top five. That is what we need to do.
  Now, once again, this does not include the rail transit. If you add 
the rail transit in, these numbers are a little bigger. That is the 
kind of effort.
  The United States Senate, what did they decide to do in their bill 
called the Senate DRIVE Act? $276 billion compared to $246 billion over 
6 years; $74.9 billion for transit, compared to $64 billion. That is 
good. That is $10 billion. Better, but not enough. We actually need 
over $114 billion or $115 billion.
  The entire sum on the Senate side, not including rail, is $361 
billion compared to $319 billion. Better, but not enough. Not 
sufficient to build the infrastructure that this economy and this 
society need to move out of 16th place back into the top tier of five.
  Now, where is the House of Representatives?
  This week, we are going to take up a bill that is less than the 
Senate bill and just a little, teeny, tiny bit better than what we are 
doing today. So if you are happy with what we are doing today, you will 
love the House bill. But if you don't want potholes, if you want to 
deal with congestion, if you want to deal with ports and freight, if 
you want to move from a D to a B or an A, you don't do it with the 
House bill.
  I understand, this is a starting point. This is the beginning of 
negotiations. But why in the world would you begin negotiations at the 
bottom when you need to get to the top? It beats me. I don't get it.
  We have got to build the American infrastructure. It is how we move 
our economy. It is how we move people back to work in good, middle-
class jobs. It is how your tax money should be spent.
  And how can we raise the revenue for this?
  Well, we don't need to increase the gasoline or the diesel tax. Keep 
it the same, no increase. People can argue that it should or should not 
be increased, but you don't need to.
  This proposal, the GROW AMERICA Act, the additional $100-plus billion 
dollars over 6 years to build our infrastructure, is fully paid for by 
keeping the gasoline and the diesel tax at the level it is today and 
going after the hidden profits of the United States corporations that 
have skipped out on their responsibility to this country.
  They are hiding their profits overseas. We need to go after those 
profits and say: You owe it to America; bring that money back and pay 
your just taxes. That is how this is paid for, fully paid for.
  How much? About $120 billion over 6 years, enough to get the job 
done.
  American corporations won't be allowed to run away from their 
responsibility to their country. They will pay their fair share, here 
in America. No more tax dodges overseas, folks.
  So, where are we? The question for the Congress of the United States 
is: Are we going to go with what we have today, just a little bit more, 
just keeping up with inflation? Is that good enough for America to be 
number one? No, it is not.
  Can we do better without burdening the truckers, without burdening 
the commuters? We can, if we are willing to step up to the American 
corporations, the big and the powerful, and say: Pay your fair share.
  Oh, by the way, their fair share is 14 percent, which is less than 
one-half of the corporate tax rate.
  We will see what happens. The House of Representatives, the men and 
women that you have elected, are going to make some decisions. We will 
make a decision about Speaker eventually. That will get taken care of 
eventually. We will make some decisions about a few other things. But 
the infrastructure issue of this Nation is fundamental to economic 
growth.
  I hope we make the right decision. I hope we make the decision to 
grow this economy, to make it in America, spend your tax dollars here 
at home, and give you the roads, the transit system, the ports, the 
freight movement, the airports that you need and America needs.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________