(Source: Streetsblog & Wall Street Journal)

The Obama administration is working on a plan to fill the shortfall in the nation’s highway trust fund by August without adding to the federal deficit, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told Congress yesterday.

The highway trust fund, which relies mostly on gas-tax revenue, will need up to $7 billion in additional money by the end of summer to ensure states continue receiving payments, LaHood told the transportation subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The fund also will need up to $10 billion in the 12 months after September to ensure its solvency, LaHood said.

“We believe very strongly that any trust fund fix must be paid for,” LaHood told members of the House Appropriations Committee’s transportation panel. “We also believe that any trust fund fix must be tied to reform of the current highway program to make it more performance-based and accountable, such as improving safety or improving the livability of our communities — two priorities for me.”

The administration’s quest to offset its trust fund fix, which will cost as much as $7 billion, could prove fruitless.  Rep. John Olver (D-MA), chairman of the panel that greeted LaHood today, put it simply when asked if the necessary spending cuts could be found. “That’d be very tough,” he said, noting that his own annual transportation spending is unlikely to become law before the highway trust fund runs out of cash.  Replenishing the trust fund with a cost offset, as LaHood suggests, requires a serious conversation about finding new long-term revenue sources for not just highways but all modes of transportation.

But he said the President Barack Obama administration has ruled out raising the gas tax to provide additional funding, saying an economic recession isn’t the time to make such a move.  “We are not going to raise the gasoline tax. I’ll just say that emphatically,” LaHood said.

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(Source: TheTrucker.com & AP)

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood took exception to an Associated Press articlethat reported that counties suffering the most from job losses stand to receive the least help from President Barack Obama’s plan to spend billions of stimulus dollars on roads and bridges, an Associated Press analysis has found.  Although the intent of the money is to put people back to work, AP’s review of more than 5,500 planned transportation projects nationwide reveals that states are planning to spend the stimulus in communities where jobless rates are already lower.

Image Courtesy: AP - U.S. map shows amount of stimulus funds announced for transportation, by county

Altogether, the government is set to spend 50 percent more per person in areas with the lowest unemployment than it will in communities with the highest.

“At the DOT, we have $48 billion to rebuild roads, bridges, highways, airport runways, ports and transit projects,” LaHood wrote. “And we have already signed off on transportation projects in all 50 states. Just 12 weeks after President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law, we have approved 2,800 road projects and another 300 airport projects.”

LaHood said that amounted to over $10 billion “out the door and countless Americans going back to work.”

By this summer, LaHood wrote, Americans won’t be able to drive down the street without seeing people working at good-paying jobs.

He attributed those jobs to the Recovery Act money.

“Unfortunately, the AP’s analysis is misguided,” LaHood said. “Its reporters looked at 5,500 transportation projects from state lists and concluded that the transportation money is going to counties with low unemployment. But until the states make a request and the experts at the DOT certify that a project meets the criteria for Recovery dollars, those lists are not the final word.

 “Basically, their (the Associated Press’) work amounts to nothing more than an academic exercise.”

For people who are out of work and at risk of losing their jobs, this construction work is a godsend, LaHood said he believed.

“Sadly, unemployed workers can be found all over our nation in these difficult economic times — even in counties that don’t have the highest unemployment rates,” the secretary wrote

“Governmental boundaries are often arbitrary, and workers know that,” LaHood noted. “People who work construction jobs often drive to wherever they can find work in a metropolitan area or region. Our idea is to drive down unemployment, period.”

LaHood said he told Brett Blackledge, the Associated Press writer who authored the story, about a recent trip he took to New Hampshire for a groundbreaking on highway 101.

“I shook hands with men and women who are going back to work thanks to the Recovery Act,” LaHood said. ”One man told me that he drives all over New England for construction jobs. Another said he is the father of four children and was unemployed until this project began. Now that he has this job, he will be commuting from Wolfeboro.

“Unfortunately, Brett didn’t think it was worth quoting me when I told him that the point of the program is to put people to work. And that’s something I’m proud of.”