 Good afternoon and thank you for attending today's briefing on a new report quantifying the investment requirements for America's multimodal transportation system. AASHTO, APTA, and the Transportation Research Board have worked together to produce such reports in prior authorization cycles and are proud to do so again. I am Art Guzzetti, the Vice President for Policy of the American Public Transportation Association, APTA. Today you will hear from the single two people closest to America's highway and public transportation needs, Bud Wright and Michael Malanafi. Bud Wright is Executive Director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, the organization we know as AASHTO, celebrating its 100th year as AASHTO is the long-standing national association for all of the state DOTs. Bud's background includes service as Executive Director of the Federal Highway Administration and other safety and finance positions in FHWA. He became AASHTO's Executive Director in January 2013. Michael Malanafi, my boss, became President and CEO of APTA in 2011. He brought with him a strong public transportation background in both the operating side and the supplier side of the business. Michael ran the transit systems in Charlotte, North Carolina, Wichita, Kansas, Hamilton, Ohio, Laredo, Texas. Immediately prior to coming to APTA, Michael served 10 years as Vice President for the bus manufacturer MCI Motor Coach Industries where he was responsible for operations in the United States and Canada. But I note that AASHTO celebrating its 100th year, APTA's routes go back to 1882. So we predate the internal combustion engine itself at APTA. I also want to acknowledge the great work and partnership of Carol Werner and her outstanding team at the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We thank them for their always exceptional efforts with these briefings. Bud and Michael will each make presentations and they will take questions and answers following that. And Bud, you were up first. Art, thank you very much. And we'll take being the young up-and-comer on the block at 100 years old, so we're proud of that. Thanks, everybody, for coming out today. I know it's not a great weather day outside, but I guess we can be thankful that the weather is liquid rather than frozen today and enjoy that. Carol and I have some important information to share with you this afternoon about the ongoing underinvestment in roads, bridges, and transit infrastructure in this country. The new bottom line report prepared for AASHTO and the American Public Transportation Association makes a strong case that just shoring up the highway trust fund to maintain current levels will not make much of a dent in the needed transportation investment that will improve economic performance and Americans' quality of life. It shows that a flat-level federal program will not keep pace with rising levels of vehicle miles traveled on highways or with the growing demands for public transportation services much less close the investment gap that already exists. So what is the bottom line report? AASHTO and APTA wanted to develop a resource that would be the most comprehensive analysis of the nation's surface transportation investment needs. The bottom line report previously published in 2002 and 2009 is based on the forecasting models and data systems used by the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration and on results of Federal Highway Administration analyses supplemented by additional research. What are the key findings of the bottom line report? Currently, governments at all levels are investing about $105 billion annually in capital improvements for the U.S. highway and transit networks. But they need to spend $59 billion more each year to improve the transportation system and keep up with rising demand. Just for highways and bridges, we need $740 billion over the next six years, roughly $120 billion a year. But the investment currently by all levels of government is about $88 billion. That's a more than $30 billion gap that grows each year. For transit, we need to be spending $43 billion annually to improve system performance, but annual capital spending is much less, just $17.1 billion a year. So what are the ramifications of all that? Obviously, this report points out the massive challenge that faces the United States Congress and every unit of government in the United States. When we think of the federal contribution to capital projects, we often overlook the separate operating costs that state DOTs and local agencies face, from patching potholes and running snow plows to paying worker salaries. Total operating and capital spending by governments on highways is about $156 billion a year. The federal share is only about one-fourth of that amount, leaving the remainder to states, cities, counties, and increasingly the private sector to pick up the rest. And states are stepping up and investing more. Just in the last month, Iowa and North Dakota substantially increased their transportation investment. Meanwhile, states as diverse as Wisconsin, Texas, Washington, and Utah are all working on serious proposals to address perceived shortfalls in state-level investments. But state and local governments cannot do it alone. There has to be a federal program. There has to be a national vision guiding the transportation investment that occurs in this country. And that's why it's so important for the Congress to act and to act now. I hope that everybody in this room knows that the current federal surface transportation authorization legislation expires on May 31, less than three months from now. And yet we don't have a plan on the table for how to deal with that, how to find the revenues necessary to make the investment that's necessary at the federal government level. Let's take a short moment and watch a video that I think really makes the case for why we need to make the hard choices now. This is something that we put together in conjunction with an infographic that Ashley mentioned investment. Go ahead. Thank you. Marica has always been defined by big thinking and the will to accomplish great things. That same spirit has long fueled our transportation system. From the turn of the 20th century, when we began to connect our farms to our towns, to the 1950s, when we created a national system of highways and a way to pay for them through the Highway Trust Fund, to today, when our integrated network of roads, rail, ports, air and public transit helps get us where we need to go. As our transportation system expanded, so has our economic prosperity. New industries emerged, new trade corridors surfaced. We have greater freedom to choose the jobs we wanted and the places where we wanted to live. Without the ambitious vision of our leaders, both national and local, the American dream would look much different today. But if you think that dream will go on uninterrupted, think again. While our nation continues to grow, our transportation system hasn't. Since the 1950s, the number of motor vehicles has quadrupled, challenging our ability to maintain our infrastructure and preserve our investments and our overworked transit system struggles to meet the demands of nearly 11 billion annual passengers. Business owners have to rely on a freight network in danger of not delivering. Commuters spend hundreds of extra hours sitting in their cars, either because of congested roadways or because they don't have viable public transportation options. Family vacations are detoured by unsafe bridges. Our workers are stuck choosing jobs based on distance rather than opportunity. But what if our system could keep up with a level of funding in line with the realities of 2015 and beyond? Skilled workers wouldn't have to move away to find better jobs. We could get better access to our abundant natural resources and agricultural products. We could again climb the ranks of global competitiveness. Every dollar invested in highways or transit returns two to three times that amount to the economy. In other words, if we continue to improve our transportation system, the average American household could benefit for more than $5,000 in extra annual income. It's time to get back to thinking big. To once again ensure the strength of our solutions meets the size of our challenges. In 2015, let's restore our trust in the Highway Trust Fund and let's redefine how we move our mission forward. As I said earlier, this is going to require hard choices and difficult action by the Congress. But I think it boils down to something fairly simple. We have a choice between making the country stronger or making the country weaker. And without this transportation investment taking place, we will make the country weaker. With that, let me turn things over to Michael Milanoffi. Michael. Thank you very much. Thank you to all of you for coming here this afternoon. We certainly appreciate it. Thank you to our friends at ESI for hosting us today. You are generous as always. I'm Michael Milanoffi, President and CEO of the American Public Transportation Association, also known as APTA. We're pleased today to be here with my good friend, Bud Wright, and our friends here at AASHTO. And I think that it says so much to see us sitting here side-by-side public transportation and the highway and bridge people to be together to talk about transportation as a system. It's so critical that we look at all of this as a system working together. There are no monolithic pieces of bus and rail and highways and roads. It's all about us working together as a system. And it's our duty as transportation professionals to share this message with everyone else. I want to take a moment to acknowledge the authors of the report. They're with us here today. Alan Posarkey and Arley Reno, thank you very much for your very hard work on it. Please give them a hand for doing an excellent report. And like all good pieces of work, it's a collaboration and they collaborated with the National Research, was sponsored jointly by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program and the Transit Cooperative Research Program. And I think that Diane Schweger is here with us as well. Thank you for being here and thank you for all your work in helping us to facilitate this good research work. As Bud touched on, the bottom line report estimates 163 billion is needed annually over the next six years to fix the nation's aging service transportation system. This includes an annual capital investment of nearly 43 billion for public transportation. And as Bud touched on, only 17 billion of that is being funded right now on an annualized basis. This is creating a tremendous investment gap. At a time when just this week we announced the highest ridership numbers in 58 years. 10.8 billion trips were taken on public transportation last year. The last time it was that high was 1956 when gasoline was 23 cents a gallon. It's time for us to really look at investment infrastructure. Let's look at this first chart here. This chart display here shows the current annual capital funding that's not sufficient to cover the ongoing asset replacement need. The FTA recently determined that the state of good repair backlog alone is 88 billion dollars. That's not ongoing operations, that's not expansion. That's just state of good repair ongoing backlog. So the study looked at a variety of different growth scenarios and it chose the mid-level assumption as the basis for the investment requirements. Our infrastructure is a product of an intergovernmental partnership with federal, state, local, and passenger fares all combining together to fund our nation's public transportation systems. It truly takes a collaboration of many parties to make this happen. May 31, May 21, or map 21 is going to expire and obviously we need to renew that. We need to have a consistent stream of funding to go forward. We must have something that we can depend on, that we can make long range plans on so that we can build our nation's highways, bridges, and public transportation in a smart, efficient, effective dependable way. Lurching month to month, quarter by quarter with short-term extensions isn't going to create the strongest and best transportation system in the world. We have to do this together in a collaborative long-term way. It provides access for jobs, for mobility in our communities, for transportation and travel choices. We have to have all of these together. So let's look at some 20-year trends. We talked about the highest ridership in 20 years and 58 years. Let's look at some growth rates. Since 1995, the population of this country has grown 21 percent. 1995 to now, 21 percent growth rate in population. VMT vehicle miles traveled. The metric we often use for how much people are driving has grown about 25 percent. So fairly parallel past population growth in VMT growth. In that same period of time, if you see the blue line on the top there, that's public transit growth. We're up 39 percent in that same time period. So 21 percent population growth, 39 percent public transit growth. The high number we saw last year wasn't just an anomaly. It wasn't a result of spiking gas prices. In fact, in the fourth quarter of last year gas prices dropped 43 cents a gallon. Yet we saw a 1 percent increase in ridership across the country. We are seeing a change in how people move about our country and how they access public transportation and how they're growing and building our communities. We've done a couple of studies here recently that help support the data we're seeing here. The first is an economic study. We looked at how do we quantify the benefits of putting in new infrastructure. Why do we build new infrastructure? We don't build it just to create hard hat and yellow vest jobs. We do it to make something better. So in an economic study, we looked at typically we create our hard hat jobs or about 21,000 jobs for every $1 billion investment. When you look at the better, when you measure the better, we come up with over 50,000 jobs that are created or sustained as a result of each billion-dollar investment in our nation's public transportation infrastructure. Bringing these numbers together creates real jobs and creates not just the jobs that build the things, but create the jobs that make our economy stronger, make our country stronger, and as Bud so eloquently pointed out, creates better global competitiveness for our nation. And there's several trends that we're seeing that are driving some of these things. Certainly, one of the metrics that's also important is that $1 in public transportation, your slideshow between two and three in the public transit space, we see it as high as four times return on investment with those dollars. And two things we're driving at is we look at both ends of the geological spectrum. The millennials are coming in to the marketplace in a big way. We did a recent study looking at the travel patterns of millennials, and 70% of them prefer to live in a community that gives them transportation choices. When we grew up as kids, we had a binary choice, didn't we, Bud? You could either take a car or you took transit. It was one of the two. That's what you did. And we looked down, and it was a wide variety. You could take a bus to trains, shared-use cars, shared-use bike, all these different things within a week. We're changing how we move about our communities. And because of this change, we're seeing how we also use our systems differently, instead of having fold-out schedules that were hard to read, especially on rainy days like today. Informations on our smart phones, and we're equipping our buses and trains with 3G, 4G, smart technology. We know where the vehicles are going to be. We can even pay for our fares with our phones in many cities now. And it's giving us greater access to our communities and changing how we live and how we build our urban environment. And with that, we need a seamless transportation that supports it. And it's not just about the infrastructure for the roads, bridges, highways, and transit. It's not just for the businesses. It's how we build our residential infrastructure as well and how that's impacted by our transportation choices. We did a study with the National Association of Realtors and we found in the time from 2008 to 2013 during the toughest economic recession of our lifetime. We studied a number of cities across the country, new and old, from Phoenix to Boston, oldest transit system in the country, one of the newest. We looked at housing, residential housing stock, along high frequency rail transit corridors and we found that housing stock was 42% more resilient. What does that mean? It means as prices dropped out from under the economy and around housing, those prices dropped less. And as the economy came back, they came back quicker. What we found was that residential housing stock along high frequency transit corridors was as valuable as ocean front property. And if you had rail ocean front property, you were in California and you were loving it. You could do everything. Right. So why do we have these other reports, these numbers? Because it all supports these different messages. It isn't just this report here, the bottom line report saying alone that these numbers are real. These things are happening. As we look from multiple angles at all these pieces, they support that these numbers are very real. These needs for our country are very real. So why does it take what happens when we build our infrastructure? Public transit is a $61 billion a year industry. 400,000 people employed in our industry. And here's a really neat stat. When we talk about the efficiency of government funding, people say, oh, should we devolve this to the stage? Should we do it where we could do it more efficiently and effectively? But what really are the investments of the federal government and our other government partners? They're really for capital funding. The federal government doesn't build our rolling stock. They don't build our buses, trains, and our shelters and our transit centers. The private sector does. So we analyze these government dollars coming into our business fully 73% of the government dollars that are flowing into the public transit space are going right through to the private sector. They're creating jobs all across the country. When we build rail cars for New York, for Miami, for Los Angeles, we're creating jobs all across the nation in places like Lincoln, Nebraska, buses in Aniston, Alabama, or Pemma, North Dakota, or trains in Boise, Idaho. We're creating good-paying, high-technical jobs all across the country. An investment in public transportation in the nation's total transportation system creates jobs and a vibrant economy all across this country. It stretches border to border. As we look at the changing way we fund and finance our programs, it's not just about government funding. It's also about financing programs. We're seeing, of course, talk of RIF loans and TIFIA loans, but also public private partnerships. But those that play in the PPP space, as we found at a recent meeting we had at the Treasury Department, which was supported by Secretary Fox, Secretary Pritzker, and Secretary Lew, we talked about how those that invest in the private sector play on a global scale. They look where the best places around the world to invest their private sector dollars to build infrastructure. Now, like infrastructure, you can have good revenue streams or hard assets. There's a good government purpose to them. When we look at our country's patchwork of 50 different states of PPP rules that some allow, some prohibit, some do, some don't, and uncertain federal infrastructure investment, it raises the risk quotient for PPP investment. It makes us a more risky investment. There's an aversion to investing those PPP dollars in our country when you look at us in comparison to places like our neighbor to the north in Canada or our friends in Australia that have more reliable dependable funding and more standardized local funding models at the state or provincial levels. If we want to play in this world, if we want to bring in this innovative financing, we have to look at policy as well as long-term funding to bring the packaging together. So some might suggest that by getting all players in government to work together and passing a long-term bill, it's too high of a mountain to climb. However, we look back at the history of the presidential administrations and our congresses and of enacted bills. It's important to take some lessons from that. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan with the majority Democratic House and the majority Republican Senate worked together to raise the federal gas tax from four cents to nine cents. He called that program a nickel for America. Four cents for roads, bridges and highways. One cent for transit. That's the origin of the 80-20 split. We've supported that ever since. This discussion that there's been a diversion of highway funds into transit is simply not true. We've been there just as we are today in a partnership looking at it as a holistic system. Dedicated funds for road bridges and highways, dedicated funds for transit coming out of this user fee based system. And is it just that happened back in 83 with Reagan? Look at 91 with President George H.W. Bush during a Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate, they worked together to increase the federal gas tax from nine to 14.1 cents. As we went to President Clinton in Congress, the last gas tax increase, more than 20 years ago in 1993, Democratic president, Democratic majority in both houses, tax was raised from 14.1 to the current 18.4 cents. So I believe and I predict that the current and the current economic model, we can get this done. We must get this done. Our nation is counting on us to invest in what is truly a nonpartisan, bipartisan bicameral investment in our country. Our nation's infrastructure needs this. America needs this. We need to invest in our infrastructure. And this report clearly quantifies the data we need to support this important investment in our country. Thank you very much. And we stand ready for questions. Yeah, sorry. Kelly Maynard can see if you don't call. Are there any specific programs in that point that you're keeping an eye on in an upcoming new highway bill that you're considering might disappear under the legislation? I would say no. I don't necessarily see any programs disappear. But one of the things that Ashlet certainly has adopted as a policy approach for our states is that we like the notion of having a performance-based program, one in which states are expected to achieve certain outcomes, and then they're given the flexibility to achieve those outcomes. So certainly one of the things that we have been emphasizing in our discussions with members of Congress and their staffs is that that flexibility is important. Creating additional new programs, new categories, new slices of funding make it more difficult to achieve those kinds of performance-based outcomes. So while I don't see any of the I'll call them broad-eligibilities disappearing, you know, certainly there may be some tinkering with the program descriptions and such as we go forward in Map 21 reauthorization. And so we've looked at, it's a great question, we've looked at local transit tax initiatives across the country, we've been tracking them since 2000, then 70% passage rate, which we had 69% passage rate, or 71% passage rate last year with 49% of 61 local initiatives passed. And when we look at why all these local initiatives passing and there's a harder hill to climb at the federal level, that's to do with accountability. And so as Bud touched on with Map 21 there's still obviously many, many other rules that have to be promulgated that have yet to come out of the 27-month bill. And among those are performance-based metrics and having those allows us to have more accountability and more transparency in the federal program. So we're not just saying we're going to do good, we're going to do better, we're going to actually measure those things and demonstrate that. And we think that's a key piece. Obviously another thing we're looking for that's coming out of Map 21 is the FTA for the very first time is becoming a regulatory agency and having a wide and broad mandate on safety and security in this nation's public transportation systems. So we look forward to those things coming out. And I think as we've talked with Congress we see this next bill being less about major policy changes. A lot of those policy changes were truly captured in Map 21 although it was 27 months of bill as we know it was about 60 months worth of policy. So we look forward to those things coming out and then matching that with the proper funding so that we can have a good long-term implementation of a very good, robust and flexible program for our country going forward. You want to see those performance metrics kept from Map 21 into the new legislation? Well that was one of the things that was a key component of that. And it was looking at your assets and grading your assets, looking at that true state of good repair. It's one thing for us to say we have a state of good repair need. It's another to be able to measure that and have national standards for that. National standards are very important and investment in our research, our technology and our standards programs are critical. And why so they can come back to this so we can have a reasonable to the citizens of this country and having that data is important. So those are some of the many things that we're still waiting to be fully rolled out and waiting for the ANPRMs and NPRMs and the rules and we expect that will be helpful for us moving forward and look forward to that. Great question. Thank you. Gentlemen, thank you for your time and for the presentation. Very compelling. On the funding side of things, VMT per capita in this country has been on its way down since 2004, total VMT since the beginning of the Great Recession. It's the definite trend and you mentioned what's going on with millennials. We also have cafe standards increasing dramatically over the next several years. So long story short, consumption of gasoline is on a downward trajectory. From a revenue side, are there any policy recommendations that you are making beyond raising the retail gas tax if that even is a policy recommendation? And if so, from an advocate's perspective, how do we participate in those discussions when we're back in district? Well, first of all, on the VMT issue, there isn't any question that in this recent period of time that there has been some reduction in VMT per capita, but I think one of the things that has been widely reported, which isn't true, is that VMT as a whole is declining. VMT is actually rising in the country. We project, in fact, a bottom line report that a growth rate that is one percent or greater is likely for the future, but all of the factors that you describe with regard to the reliability of the federal gasoline tax or gas taxes at state and local level are definitely true. And one of the reasons why there is a lot of discussion about looking at different approaches for funding transportation in the future, whether they be mileage-based user fees or other approaches, but we're not ready for that now. I mean, the technology is there. We're certainly doing some experimentation and there are pilots in various states looking at mileage-based user fees. Right now, I think many would say that the gasoline tax, if it were to be continued or increased, has the capacity to carry us forward certainly through a next reauthorization period, if not beyond. For the longer term, I would absolutely agree with you that we'll have to look at other solutions. Now, all of that said, back in December, I would have suggested that there may be some momentum gathering that gasoline tax or a user-based approach is the most likely outcome with regard to how the Congress might choose to fund transportation investment, but much of that enthusiasm seems to have died out as we turn the page with the new Congress and into 2015, and the approaches that the Congress seem to be more considering now are ones that are not directly related to transportation but are ways in which to create additional revenues through the general fund to support transportation investment. I will say that we have been relatively agnostic on that issue. What we are looking for is something that is long-term and sustainable, and we're not going to frankly be picky about what solution the Congress comes up with, but making sure that a solution is derived that can give us some certainty, that can enable states and local governments and transit entities to be able to plan their projects as long as possible into the future, I think is one of the key elements that we're all looking for. I think actually we had a chart in my presentation that substantially exactly what Bonn had talked about. There continues to be, we showed a 25% increase in VMT over that 95 to 2015 time frame. That's tracking right on there. We of course support any and all revenue streams, and we're grateful to take all the dollars or green. This, our primary job here is to substantiate the need. No question we have to do that. Now certainly, APTA is on record supporting Aztecs increase, because it's a user-based fee. And the more that we can show a user-based fee in a correlation of how we operate and fund our programs, I think the user it is for the public to understand that. We look at what, we have a gap, the trust fund runs out May 31. We have a tremendous gap we've got to fill there, and what are options that can fill that quickly, what are options that can not have to borrow against the general fund? What are options that can be created without creating new bureaucracy? Is there a small government? Certainly, an increase in the user-based fee makes some sense and matches both the, you know, values of both sides of the House and the Senate by having a small government-based program that's very efficient. It's only collected 1,000 refineries around the country. It's an option. But there are many, many options out there, and certainly APTA takes a very agnostic position as well. We're going to work with all different options and to see what can best fund the program. The key here is we need a long-term, well-funded bill. Now, if we could continue past six years, fantastic, but at a minimum, we need good, well-funded six-year bill. Hi, I'm Tony DeSantis with the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers in Philadelphia. You mentioned that an increase in the gasoline tax could carry us through the next authorization. I'm wondering how much of a gasoline tax do you want realistically can we expect from this Congress? Well, I won't answer the question of how much we want because we haven't really attached ourselves to a particular funding level as the outcome that would be the most promising, but I can tell you approximately what it would take in order to maintain the current levels of funding plus inflation, and that would be an increase somewhere in the magnitude of 12 to 14 cents per gallon. That would carry us, that would create the level of revenues necessary to bridge the current funding gap. Some of you in the room may not be aware that just maintaining the current level of the federal fees that flow into the highway trust fund would require a substantial reduction in the current investment level at the federal level, which is why we are in the position that we are in. Just to do what we're doing now is going to require substantial infusion of revenues into the highway trust fund. That's what it would take to maintain current investment levels, yes. And we take a similar position. We know what it takes to maintain it, but we just talked about this backlog. Good enough is not good enough. Keeping the current state is moving our country backwards. And as we look at, if we truly want to get away from transfers from the general fund and we want to get into user-based fees, it's going to take an increase there to do that. But if you're going to do it, take the challenge and do it once and do it right. Don't keep coming back and piece me a little bit here and there. Do it as a good one-time move. It's been more than 20 years since we've done it. It's time. I'm going to throw out a question relative to the bottom-line report. And while we look for a few more until we conclude, the bottom-line report connects with the requirements. That's what the report does. Michael and Bud both talked about return on investments. And I'm wondering if you can make a case that a transportation bill could pay for itself in the sense that you underpin the economy necessarily through the transportation investments that sparks economic activity which generates additional revenues to pay for itself. Well, I mean, that's probably a question that somebody at CBO would be most appropriate to answer because that gets into the notion of dynamic scoring and it's not something that is currently permissible within the rules under which CBO or for that matter OMB operates. Certainly we know that just based on some of the information that was reported but as with many other initiatives taken at the federal level, that ability to connect back that economic growth and economic activity to the investment levels that are actually required for the underlying legislation is not something that currently can be done. Often we're asked why don't we operate our systems like they do in Asia and some European countries where the railroad is just part of what they do that they own the retail buildings, the retail, the residential and those fund the railroad and the concept is called value capture and that's where they truly you can pay for themselves but our current the way that our current legislation and our current regulatory environment exists, it's not very conducive to us doing that. If you were to go over to Japan or Hong Kong and you look at their buildings along there and that's how you can pay for themselves for that value capture and as we look at future models that make sense as we look at our corridors where we build this infrastructure there's ways for that revenue to help fund the ongoing operation and maintenance of those that benefit from the placement of that infrastructure as we put in those fixed guideway corridors, those that benefit if they can help fund the ongoing operation. That's kind of the way that the New York Central and the Pennsylvania railroad and all the rest of those railroads also built their empires because they not only built the tracks but they also owned the land. That is a good point. I was thinking more that the governmental investment would come back in the way of sparking economic activity and bringing that into the future. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about devolution specifically. You're talking about a favorable environment for local tax initiatives. We see areas that are miles ahead in terms of payment condition. Orange County comes the example because that's where I'm actually from previously. Why not put the energy into devolution as a hot topic here on the roadway network in Orange County isn't particularly rough. If you're talking Orange County, California or Florida for that matter. Look, this is a national program with national significance and national implications. It takes a partnership. The local governments play a role. The passengers pay a role. They pay their fare every time they get on their bus or train. States in most cases play a role and the federal government plays a role. This is a national system. Let us not be fooled by this notion that oh, we could take the 2.86 cents or even the 18 cents of the gas tax and just raise the state gas taxes 18 cents. It doesn't work that way. One, we've got a major infusion of money from the general fund right now. Second all, different states have different levels. You could see 30, 40, 50 cent gas increase, gas tax increases in individual states. That's untenable. This is a national program of national significance. It is to create a national partnership. Devolution does not make our country stronger. That's not how we build a great national economy. Let me just say very simply, devolution won't work, doesn't work. That federal foundation is critical and Michael is absolutely right that the amount necessary to increase the tax rate or whatever other revenue source of state might use would be so significant in some states as to be impossible to achieve. And when that becomes the case, then the nature of a national program, one that has an interconnected system disappears. And that's why we have a federal program. I mean, there are many members in the Congress who point back to the Constitution as the foundation for why we invest in transportation. That's very legitimate. It started with the ability to move commerce across state borders. And that really continues to be the solution. You lose the possibility of achieving that over the long term. I just want to add one other point on that. It used to be that we had a very strong federal piece there and the challenge had been would the local step up to bring up their match. And what we've seen now is the locals, the communities have found they appreciate the investment infrastructure. They get it. They understand it. They trust their local operators to do good things. Whether they're building roads, highways, transit, they get it. We want to have a competitive community. And so we'll tax ourselves to do that. But in partnership, we've stepped up at a local level, you federal government also step up and do as a partnership. So I think it's less about a devolution to the local level and more about the states and localities have made a stronger partner. They're looking for their federal government to continue to be their strong partner there as well. Eugene Malero with Transport Topics. Another funding proposal if you can maybe weigh in congressional leaders are telling people that highway funding and transportation funding should be made part of an overall tax reform package. Could you, you know, just share your thoughts about that. And also, can you speak a little bit about the administration's, you know, what we briefly have so far on their New Grow America Act and their funding proposal there? Well, I mean, I will start by saying I'm not a tax policy expert. I'm more of a transportation expert and that's probably something things a little bit to even claim that. But, I mean, certainly there are non-user based options on the table. You know, I think it's a matter of political speculation as to what the right environment is going to be for any one of those approaches to move forward. You know, we've certainly made the case to members of Congress that not acting before March 3rd, I mean before May 31st is going to result in significant impacts around this country. But, how they get there, what the political compromises that are necessary to come up with that funding package might have to be. I wish I were able to tell you what the answer to that is because there are plenty of people who probably are at the controls who haven't yet figured out exactly how all that's going to come together. I'm with about 100% on that piece and with respect to the Grow America Act or Grow America 2 as the revised six years. Look, those little pieces we may or may not agree with here and there, but overall we're very pleased to see that the administration clearly is messaging to Congress. A strong and major investment in a nation's infrastructure, surface transportation infrastructure is critical. And we must do this, we must make these investments and I think it's good messaging to Congress Richard Trump, oh I'm sorry, I'm David Cameron and I'm Assistant Director of Teamsters Rail Conference. I have to member. But at a Senate hearing you had Richard Trumpka from the AFL CIO of Donahue from the Chamber of Commerce yourself. This report, a slew of other reports, desperate needs, bridges collapsing, population poverty. The need is so evident and here at this hearing unanimous from business, from labor, from special interest groups, let's increase funding for transportation, gas tax, vehicle miles traveled, refinery fee, something, but nothing gets done. So in the face of all of this unanimous support for it, what do we do now? I truly believe we are going to have a service transportation bill this year. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D. D.