NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | June 5, 2015 | PAGE 7
On highway and mass transit funding bill
Congress kicks the can down the road — again
WASHINGTON, D.C. (PAI)—Amid
grumbling about Congress’ tendency to
“kick the can down the road,” lawmakers
last month passed a two-month extension
of the highway and mass transit trust
fund. President Obama signed the exten-
sion just days before the federal gas tax
was set to expire—May 31.
The stopgap highway bill will allow in-
frastructure and mass transit projects to
continue until the middle of the summer
without Congress having to come up with
any new money.
For the last 12 years, Congress has
failed to come up with a long-term fund-
ing plan. Instead, they have relied on
short-term extensions. This last go-round,
lawmakers were unable to reach agree-
ment on a seventh-month patch.
Unions reluctantly backed the exten-
sion to July 31.
“It is a sad state when a two-month leg-
islative extension is a victory,” said AFL-
CIO Transportation Trades Department
President Ed Wytkind. “But we called for
this action. A short-term bill gives a
chance to build momentum around a
longer-term funding bill that gives states
and businesses the certainty they need,
boosts middle-class job creation, and ends
the mindless, short-sighted game of
patchwork extensions.”
“Americans can’t get away from the
crumbling state of our infrastructure,”
added Laborers President Terry O’Sulli-
van. He calculated infrastructure repairs
employ one of every nine construction
workers. “Members of Congress can’t
get away from their responsibility to do
something about it. It’s time to stop kick-
ing the can down the road, and fix the
road.”
The Obama Administration has pro-
posed a six-year, $478 billion plan called
the Grow America Act. Obama wants to
replenish the highway trust fund through
a 14 percent tax on foreign earnings held
overseas by U.S. companies.
Unions, led by the Laborers, support
increasing the 18.4-cents-per-gallon gas
tax, which hasn’t risen since 1993.
The gas tax currently covers only about
$34 billion of the $50 billion the federal
government spends each year on roads.
Republicans, who control both the
House and Senate, say there’s no chance
that an increase of the gas tax can make it
through Congress.
“This is a heck of a way to run a great
nation,” said U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-
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Oregon), the top Democrat on the House
Transportation and Infrastructure Com-
mittee. He indicated Democrats went
along with the patch out of necessity—
and demanded lawmakers craft a long-
term bill with a gas tax hike.
“Our system is falling apart. 140,000
bridges need repair or replacement. Forty
percent of the surface of the national high-
way system is in such bad shape that we
have to dig up the roadbed and resurface.
We have an $86 billion backlog in transit
just to bring the existing transit systems
up to a state of good repair,” DeFazio
said.
But Congress is “kicking the can,” as
DeFazio put it, because lawmakers refuse
to tackle the highway-mass transit trust
fund’s problems.
The Senate Environment and Public
Works Committee is expected to mark up
a six-year highway policy bill in late June.
“If lawmakers squander the chance this
summer to craft a bipartisan, long-term
bill that expands funding, the nation will
be doomed to years of transportation de-
cay and gridlock with no end in sight.
And the voters will be left with no one to
blame but the people they send to Wash-
ington,” Wytkind said.
Longshore workers ratify 5-year deal
SAN FRANCISCO—West Coast long-
shore workers ratified a new 5-year con-
tract with employers represented by the
Pacific Maritime Association (PMA).
Members of the International Long-
shore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)
voted 82 percent in favor of approving the
agreement, which will expire on July 1,
2019. The previous contract was ratified
in 2008 with a vote of 75 percent in favor.
The new agreement provides approxi-
mately 20,000 good-paying jobs in 29
West Coast port communities. The ILWU
said the contract will maintain “excellent
health benefits, improve wages, pensions
and job safety protections; limit outsourc-
ing of jobs, and provide an improved sys-
tem for resolving job disputes.”
ILWU International President Robert
McEllrath said negotiations for the con-
tract “were some of the longest and most
difficult in our recent history.”
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