WASHINGTON — Congressional negotiators Wednesday agreed on legislation to maintain current transportation spending for 27 months, focus federal dollars on highways and bridges and give states more flexibility in using money from Washington.
House and Senate conferees reached a deal three days before the latest temporary extension of existing legislation expires. The final legislation was to be filed Wednesday night, said James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the senior Senate Republican negotiator on the package.
Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, chairman of the House-Senate conference committee, said Republicans had met the Democratic-led Senate halfway.
“The bill is funded at current levels, and it will protect and create 3 million jobs,” Boxer said in a statement. “The unemployment rate in construction is at an unacceptable level.”
Without a long-term billor another extension of previous law, authority to collect the 18.4-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax and spend on highways and transit would run out Saturday, cutting off money to states for programs funded by the Highway Trust Fund such as safety and repairs. Thousands of construction and government workers would probably be idled.
The deal came together after conferees dropped two Republican-backed provisions - one requiring approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast and another barring the federal government from regulating coal ash as hazardous waste, Inhofe said.
“There are a few more things we need to do and then we’ll be ready very soon,” Inhofe told reporters.
Inhofe said he didn’t anticipate that the absence of Keystone and coal-ash provisions would threaten Republican support for the bill in the Senate.
“Keystone and coal ash are really sort of one-shot deals,” he told reporters.
Florida Republican John Mica, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said “loose ends are being tied together” after the elements under his panel’s jurisdiction were settled, including the streamlining of environmental reviews of highway and bridge projects.
House and Senate negotiators compromised on ways to speed up the approval of federally funded projects, Rep. James Lankford said.
“Now it’s a matter of figuring out if that’s going to work,” Lankford told reporters after members of the House-Senate conference committee on highways briefed House Republican leaders on their talks Tuesday. “All of us made concessions.”
Speeding environmental reviews had been one of the main sticking points in talks between the House and Senate. House Republicans, including many of the 84 in their first terms, focused on cutting the length of time it takes to complete highways and bridges built with U.S. funds, estimated at an average of 13 years, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“That’s a really big deal for us,” said Lankford, a first-term Oklahoma Republican.
House Republicans also had objected to policy that sets aside between 1 percent and 2 percent of gasoline-tax revenue for nonroad projects such as pedestrian walkways and bike paths.
States will be able to elect not to spend federal highway dollars on such items, according to a fact sheet House leaders distributed Wednesday.
The highway measure will reduce the number of projects funded and “streamline the regulatory process,” House Speaker John Boehner told reporters Wednesday morning.He said the measure allows “us to focus our highway dollars on fixing America’s highways, not planting more flowers around the country.”
House Republican leaders plan to combine the highway bill with a one-year freeze for government-subsidized student-loan rates, Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said. Otherwise, those interest rates would double to 6.8 percent Sunday.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said Tuesday that a tentative agreement had been reached on how to cover the cost of the rate freeze, estimated at $5.9 billion.
About 7.4 million studentsstand to save an average of $1,000, and President Barack Obama has made this a priority since his State of the Union address, White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement.
“We hope that Congress will complete the legislative process and send a bill to the president as soon as possible,” Carney said. The measure could come to a House vote as soon as Friday, the day before lawmakers leave for a weeklong July Fourth recess.
The compromise measure would extend current levels of spending on highways, bridges and mass transit for 27 months, Mica said.
Mica declined to specify how the bill would be paid for. Rep. Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, said a change in the way corporations fund their pensions, which would result in higher tax payments, would be one of the means.
Environmental groups and transportation advocates are concerned Senate Democrats may have made too many concessions on projects such as walking paths and wildflower planting alongside roads, said Kevin Mills, vice president of policy and trail development at the Washington-based Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.
“They’ve been tremendously cost-effective,” Mills said. “We’re concerned there not be backtracking on these vital programs.”
Still, dropping the Keystone and coal-ash provisions gave a victory to environmental groups and Democrats who had said the proposals threatened the environment and public health.
Republicans said the Keystone project would create thousands of jobs and lower dependence on foreign oil.
In addition to the highway measure and the student-loan rate freeze, the bill probably will include a reauthorization of the National Flood Insurance Program, a Senate Democratic aide said Wednesday. Floodinsurance programs expire at the end of July.
Senate consideration of legislation extending flood-insurance programs through 2016 has been slowed because Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, is insisting on a vote on an unrelated proposal specifying that human life begins at conception.
Congress last approved a long-term transportation plan in 2005 and has extended funding at those levels nine times since that measure expired almost three years ago. Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate during the first several extensions.
If Congress continues transportation spending at current levels through 2021, the Highway Trust Fund will fall between $85 billion and $115 billion short. Even if lawmakers find a new way of funding transportation to fill that gap, the spending will be far less than what is required to meet infrastructure needs.
A group led by former Transportation Secretaries Samuel Skinner and Norman Mineta has estimated that an additional $134 billion to $262 billion must be spent per year through 2035 to rebuild and improve roads, rail systems and air transportation.
The American Society of Civil Engineers has projected that $1.7 trillion should be invested between now and 2020 to rebuild roads, bridges, waterlines, sewage systems and dams that are reaching the end of their planned life cycles.
Information for this article was contributed by Jeff Plungis, Kathleen Hunter, James Rowley, Jim Snyder and Roxana Tiron of Bloomberg News and by Ashley Halsey III of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/28/2012