In a sign that deficit worries have faded, the Senate approved a six-year transportation bill on Thursday that would distribute $214 billion worth of political cheer for roads, bridges and transit systems nationwide.
The projects would include upgrading the Stevenson Expressway and Wacker Drive in Chicago.
But the battle for transportation funds is only half over. The House is working on a parallel measure, and a House-Senate conference eventually will settle differences between the two bills.
Illinois’ two Democratic senators, Carol Moseley-Braun and Dick Durbin, said they believed the bill provides enough money to finish the Stevenson Expressway project in two years and reconstruct the double-deck Wacker Drive.
But the Illinois Department of Transportation took issue with the estimate that there are enough dollars in the bill to finish the Stevenson project in two years instead of four. A department spokesman said funds would have to be taken from other projects for a speedy finish of the Stevenson.
The Senate sweetened the bill in the last week with new funds from a portion of the gasoline tax. That still wasn’t enough for some senators whose states contribute more to the Highway Trust Fund than they get back in project money.
“We are still a donor state, and I still resent it,” said Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.). The money may seem to be allocated by a fair formula, Bumpers said, “but it’s a political thing” with those controlling the formula getting the most money.
Moseley-Braun and Durbin said Illinois fared much better than they had originally hoped because of new money added to the bill in the past two weeks.
Moseley-Braun said the state will receive $5.38 billion for highway and bridge construction and $2.12 billion for transit systems over the life of the bill, enough to pay for many key projects, including modernizing U.S. Highway 67 in the western part of the state.
Illinois also is likely to receive a few more hundred million dollars from an $11 billion discretionary fund for transit systems.
The Illinois Department of Transportation spokesman, Dick Adorjan, said the state needs $7 billion over the next five years to repair existing roads–not to mention big projects like the Stevenson or reconstructing Interstate Highway 74 through Peoria.
Over the six years, the state would receive $200 million more a year than it did under the previous transportation bill, Moseley-Braun’s office said.
Though Illinois gets significantly more money, it still would receive 91 cents for every dollar the state contributes from the gasoline tax into the Highway Trust Fund, continuing its status as a donor state.
The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act sailed through the Senate on a 96-4 vote, with the senators from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin dissenting in the belief that they were due bigger shares.
Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he hopes to have the House version on the floor by April 1, with hopes that the president would sign it into law before May 1, in time to pay for construction projects this summer.
The House measure would spend $8 billion more than the Senate bill.
The transportation legislation is one of the most important that Congress will consider in an election-year session. Such a bill comes along only once every six years, touching off a tremendous political fight among regions, states and communities.
The highway and transit money is calculated on the basis of complex formulas that take into account factors such as the population, number of interstate highways and quality of the environment.
Moseley-Braun’s office said the bill would provide funds that would lengthen the platforms on the Chicago Transit Authority’s Brown/Ravenswood line, enabling the CTA to put longer trains into service.
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It also would allow rehabilitation on the Douglas branch of the Blue Line so that slow-running trains could run faster. The senator’s office also said the bill would pay for a second track on Metra’s North-Central line between Chicago and Antioch.