Mr. President, in my home state of Delaware, today, we have a problem.
Just this week in my home state, the critical I-495 bridge over the Christina river in Wilmington, which carries more than 90,000 drivers each and every day north and south on this critical artery of the East Coast of the United States, was closed indefinitely. While engineers and workers were on an unrelated project in the area, they noticed that four of the key pillars holding up the bridge were alarmingly slanted, causing widespread concerns about the bridge’s safety and prompt action to shut it down. Now, as the Delaware Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration do everything they can to get to the bottom of this problem and to work to make this bridge safe again, tens of thousands of commuters are forced onto already crowded streets and highways, creating even worse traffic for everyone in our area, hurting our economy, and taking people away from where they need to be.
It is sadly just yet another example, one that hits particularly close to home for me, in a string of major infrastructure emergencies, some due to unforeseeable events and some due to a long-term critical lack of investment, that signify why investment in our infrastructure is so important.
You know, every day when Americans drive to work or drop off their kids at school, they make a simple bargain, an unconscious bargain with their government. They assume the roads will be safe to drive on. They expect that if they drive safely, they’ll be able to get where they need to go in a reasonable amount of time.
And unfortunately, Mr. President, it’s become quite clear that while Americans continue doing what they can to move our nation and our economy forward, we here in Congress aren’t holding up our end of the bargain. We aren’t meeting our responsibilities to invest in critical areas that we all know need work. We have a lot of infrastructure needs that we know about, but we simply aren’t keeping up with them today.
This is about the end of the school year for most families with kids in school around the country, and like many other parents, I was sitting down and going over with my kids what they think their grades are at the end of the year. Well, the country also gets a grade, Mr. President. We get a grade from the American Society for Civil Engineers. These are the folks whose job it is to manage and supervise and survey the health and the capabilities of our infrastructure, our bridges and roads and highways. And this group, the American Society for Civil Engineers, well, they gave our roadways a “D.” A “D.”
And the Federal Highway Association estimates that we are dramatically behind in investing in keeping our highways and bridges and tunnels up to speed. They say we need $170 billion more in capital investments every year to improve road conditions and performance. That group of civil engineers, the ASCE, has also determined a quarter of our bridges are functionally obsolete or structurally deficient. In little old Delaware, that comes to 175 bridges that fail to meet what we would all expect of our government, that we maintain bridges, federal and state and county and local governments, that we maintain bridges to the highest level of safety that we would expect.
Well, we won’t always face unforeseen crises and challenges, but this is one that we can see coming. There may be hurricanes like the great superstorm, Hurricane Sandy, that wiped out a lot of infrastructure in my region, or there may be other unforeseeable events that impact our transportation infrastructure. But this one we’ve been seeing coming for years. This inconvenience in Delaware, this closing of the critical bridge on 495 that has put so many at inconvenience, was nowhere near the biggest transportation disaster we’ve had in recent years.
Just last year in Washington State, the Skagit River Bridge, built in 1955, literally collapsed after a truck drove into its framework. 71,000 drivers were using that bridge on a daily basis.
And I think many of us remember that way back in August of 2007, tragedy struck Minneapolis when its I-35W bridge, which extends over the Mississippi River, literally collapsed under the rush-hour traffic weight. More than 100 cars were thrown into the water. 13 people lost their lives. 145 injured.
Mr. President, if we don’t act soon, together, we’re going to face many more such tragic incidents like these. And we have to address this problem and get over our unwillingness together to invest in infrastructure that we all depend on and value.
The simple fact, as I’ve said, is that current federal investments are not keeping pace with our needs. We are, sadly, months away from exhausting the federal Highway Trust Fund – the trust fund that finances much of the highway and bridge and tunnel work around the country on the Interstate Highway System – because the gas tax that funds it hasn’t risen in 20 years but the amount of gas being consumed and, thus, gas tax revenue generated, has gone down.
Yet we don’t seem here to have the political will to implement a solution to this basic problem, that folks have been saying is coming at us, hurdling like an oncoming truck, for years.
You know, we talk a lot in this chamber about our children, about the kind of world we want to leave them, about our hopes for the future, and it’s just one of the reasons I’m so concerned about our nation’s long-term balance sheet. Many of us talk about our nation’s deficits and our potentially crippling federal debt. It is irresponsible of us to continue to rack up debt on our national balance sheet and leave it to our children and grandchildren.
But I wanted to highlight today that when we neglect our transportation infrastructure – our highways, our tunnels, our roads, our ports, our bridges – these are things that we use every single day in transporting our families or ourselves or goods to and from work, or to and from home, to school, to soccer, to vacation. These are critical pieces of the American infrastructure. We’re also racking up a huge debt there, too.
These investments have to be made one way or the other, and I know we value these systems because we depend on them every day.
So if we can’t come together in the short term on fixing this Highway Trust Fund, I’m left to wonder how we’re going to come together on the much larger problem of meeting our broader infrastructure needs of which that trust fund is just one small, but crucial part.
We face short-term, medium-term and long-term problems.
As I said, we have to fix this Highway Trust Fund before it runs out of funding just this summer. It’s what funds often 80 percent of state highway work. It is a critical part of lots of construction projects already scheduled to go on this summer. We have kept it funded by transferring money from the general fund for the last few years, but that’s not how it’s supposed to work. So we’ve got to come to terms with a solution that’s responsible and meets this challenge.
We’ve got a range of options, but none of them are appealing. Increasing the gas tax, putting a surcharge on vehicles, charging for vehicle miles traveled. All of these are unappealing politically, but it’s essential that we come up with something to solve this long-term problem. I want to thank Chairman Wyden of the Finance Committee, who’s working hard with other members of that committee even today to find a path forward and a solution.
Second, in the medium-term, we have to reauthorize, we have to approve ongoing work for highways and roads and bridges, and we need to have a reauthorization for surface transportation by this fall. The Chair and the Ranking Member of the relevant committee, Barbara Boxer of California and David Vitter of Louisiana, have shown, as has my senior senator, Tom Carper from Delaware, who also serves on this committee, that federal infrastructure investment is a bipartisan value. They’ve been able to come out of that committee with bipartisan reauthorizations a number of times over the last couple of years, and that’s encouraging to me. We also, just earlier today, just a few minutes ago, came out of the transportation subcommittee markup on appropriations, the committee that says, here’s how much we will spend. That came out with a very strong bipartisan vote earlier today and will come to the floor in the next few months.
This progress is encouraging, but it doesn’t mean anything if we don’t have a way to pay the bill when the bill comes due.
Long term, we need to figure out how to finance infrastructure in this country. There are several bills, good ideas that have been put forward in this committee, in this chamber. Two bills that I have supported, one called the BRIDGE Act and the other called the Partnership to Build America Act, would take critical steps to bring private sector money in off the sidelines and to facilitate a real partnership between government money and private sector money. These bills have been led by Senators Warner and Blunt and Bennet, are genuinely bipartisan, and enjoy support from groups that don’t often work together, from industry to labor, from the AFL-CIO to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.
There are several strong bipartisan bills that show the way forward, but we don’t seem to be able to get them to the floor, to get them approved and to get them moving forward.
Right now, the truth is that the debate on this floor comes nowhere close to matching the reality of the scope of the problems in front of us. We have an enormous infrastructure debt, as I mentioned earlier. By one estimate, by 2020, in just the next six years, our nation needs $3.6 trillion of new investment. This is to fix, to maintain, to upgrade our roads, bridges, rail, transit, drinking water, ports, sewers, waste water treatment, and beyond. This is an enormous debt. Unpaid and for which we currently have no path forward.
I know many of us who serve on the Budget Committee, who pay attention to the balance sheet of our country, are concerned about our structural national debt, but I wanted to take a minute today, on a day when everyone in my hometown and my home state is concerned about how we will tackle the problem of the I-495 bridge, and remind all of my colleagues of the scale of this national infrastructure debt.
At the heart of this problem, at the heart of so many of the problems we have here, is our unwillingness to pay for what we want, to pay the bill that is long overdue, for our long overdue improvements to the infrastructure of this great country.
Fixing this problem is going to take a great deal of revenue. We can reform taxes. We can involve the private sector. We can reprioritize funding. We can reform the way government works. We don’t lack for innovative ideas, but at the end of the day, we lack currently for will.
The people of the United States need through us to step up to the challenge of paying the bill, and in my hometown just in the last few hours, just in the last few days, we have become more engaged in this debate than we have been in a long time, because a bridge that is critical, a vital artery for our community has stopped. It is indefinitely closed, and we need to work together to find the resources to fix this bridge and to get America moving together again. It is my hope and plea that my colleagues will step up to this challenge, which I know every community in our country faces.