U.S. Mayors to Capitol Hill: It's Time to Boost Transportation Infrastructure Funding

U.S. mayors have a message for Congress: May 31 is fast approaching. That’s when the current federal surface transportation law is due to expire.

And after 13 years of flat federal funding for surface transportation investments, legislative band-aids from Congress won’t cut it.

“We want long-term funding,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday afternoon at a U.S. Conference of Mayors Cities of Opportunity Task Force gathering in Boston. “That would be the most sensible thing,” he told reporters.

De Blasio, who chairs the task force, outlined a planned municipal show of force in the coming weeks to lobby congressional leaders, including simultaneous local events in cities around the nation on April 9, where municipal leaders will press their local congressional representatives in their home districts.

A mayoral lobbying day in Washington, D.C., is also planned for May.

If national leaders on Capitol Hill can’t come together on a long-term surface transportation bill that steers more funding to help local jurisdictions improve their deteriorating infrastructure and instead keeps funding at “status quo” levels, that would be viewed as a defeat for municipal leaders.

“That’s short-term thinking,” Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges said during a press conference featuring approximately 20 U.S. mayors at Faneuil Hall, including mayors from cities like Austin, Dayton, New Orleans and Providence to name a few.

Hodges was one of the mayors who underscored the impacts of infrastructure underinvestment. In the case of her city, there was the deadly 2007 collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River. (The replacement bridge, opened in 2008, is already showing signs of aging, the Star Tribune reported last year.)

For Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, the task force vice chairman who hosted the assembled mayors in his city, this winter’s crippling impacts on Boston-area transportation infrastructure has been well documented.

Boston's transit network was severely impacted during a succession of winter storms in February. (AP Photo by Josh Reynolds)

Various winter storms in February crippled the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s aging subway, trolley and commuter rail networks and placed a heavy burden on municipal operations to clear roadways and deliver public services, especially in Boston.

De Blasio told the assembled mayors that city halls across the nation were monitoring Boston’s response to the historic weather disruptions. Considering the size and scope of the severity of the succession of storms that hit New England, Boston performed admirably well under extreme pressure.

“Marty, you handled it with extraordinary skill,” Walsh’s New York City counterpart said.

But cities are only so resilient to such challenges without adequate support from Washington.

Under current federal funding formulas, transportation infrastructure in cities across the nation will continue to stagnant and deteriorate. Walsh noted that in the past year, his city has had to close two structurally deficient bridges and that the MBTA’s network still hasn’t fully recovered from this winter’s onslaught.

“We’re going to need a federal fix here,” Walsh said.

De Blasio noted that big city mayors are not only critically important leaders in their specific municipalities but also “are leaders in their larger metropolitan community.”

Walsh said that during the task force’s meetings earlier Monday morning, the mayors stressed the “the importance of regionalization” and multi-jurisdictional collaborative efforts to address common challenges, especially underfunded transportation infrastructure.

“We’re looking at models for regional and national collaboration,” Walsh said.

But will national leaders in gridlocked Washington listen and respond?

The mayors certainly hope so.

De Blasio said the current “political context is paralyzing for us” and there haven’t been many solutions from Washington.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who is the current vice chair of the National Council of Mayors, said that infrastructure was previously a bipartisan issue in the nation’s capital. But that’s no longer the case.

Continued discord between Capitol Hill and the White House has put the nation’s cities at a competitive economic disadvantage globally, she said.

“We are off track” as a nation when it comes to infrastructure investment,” Rawlings-Blake said, delivering a message to Capitol Hill: “They have to stop fighting … [and] start fighting for our country.”

Transportation infrastructure is more about the infrastructure itself, Rawlings-Blake said. It’s about economic development, job creation and stronger communities.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray noted how municipal leaders around the country—and the constituents they represent—are regularly approving additional local investments in their transportation infrastructure and other municipal priorities.

The mayor of Washington state’s largest city noted that transportation investments in urban areas help suburban and rural areas as well, pointing to the Evergreen State’s economically important agricultural sector—a sector needs strong infrastructure connections to export those agricultural goods to markets outside the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

“Cities are around the nation are saying yes” to infrastructure improvements,” Murray said. “But we need a federal partner for our cities to be successful.”