 Good afternoon everyone. We're glad to see you all here. My name is Carol Werner and I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and we are glad that you are all here as part of this very special day of stand up for transportation which is happening across the country in so many states and congressional districts as we speak. So today I think it's very important as we, this is the second in a series of three briefings that EESI is holding in conjunction with the American Public Transportation Association and we are right now looking sort of right down the barrel of the expiration of a hugely important piece of legislation the federal transportation bill which affects transportation across the country. One of the things that I think we so often just take for granted because it's kind of always there but transportation touches all of us our communities our jobs where we go to shop all sorts of services how we get goods it affects all of us every day and we often just take it for granted and don't think about what's really involved how important the stakes are what it takes to really run this huge amount of infrastructure across our great country. So we thought that it was very very important today as we're really looking at the impacts of transportation and indeed of the transportation bill and what really is at stake to really have this kind of a conversation and to learn much more specifically about some of those impacts and to hear key voices who are really involved in terms of thinking about the economic impacts what this means for economies across the country the whole role of transportation across the country. To kick off our discussion this afternoon I went to first turn to Paul Ballmer who is the legislative assistant for transportation and many other things for representative Earl Blumenauer of Portland Oregon and of course a congressman Blumenauer is a member of the Ways and Means Committee which is very heavily involved with regard to thinking about transportation how it will be funded etc and as we all know he has also been a huge advocate for transit and as you will see from Paul's lapel bicycles. Paul? Thank you Carol thank thank you to ESI and APTA I'm honored to be here and we are here as people are at over 140 similar events around the country to stand up for transportation. This is not new territory these are not familiar faces we've all been here before we all know the surface transportation bill expires in seven weeks we all know that when Congress passes a short term extension which we likely will that will be the 24th such short term extension since we last had a six year transportation bill but we really shouldn't have to be talking about this year after year. Michael shouldn't have to explain the importance of long-term funding for his members and for transit systems and Americans across the country. Drew shouldn't have to talk about how important a stable functioning transportation system is for our economy and Emmett shouldn't have to put his projects and his planning on hold uncertain if federal funding is going to run out on the eve of P construction season. We shouldn't have to spend our time and resources pushing back against legislation that would cut the federal partnership of transportation funding by 80 percent legislation that had support of over 50 members in the House last Congress and nearly a third of the Senate but we do we do have to spend that time doing that that's why we're here that's why people around the country are standing up for transportation and a long term fully funded service bill. My boss congressman Earl Blumenauer has the answer and he's introduced legislation that would end the stalemate over the highway trust fund by raising the gas tax for the first time in 21 years. This would be a 15 cent increase phased in over three years in index to inflation and then the gas tax would expire in 10 years. That's because congressman Blumenauer has separate companion legislation that would fund pilot projects like the one in Oregon like the one in California that are exploring a road usage charge based on vehicle miles traveled as an alternative to the gas tax so that as a nation we can eventually transition to an efficient equitable funding mechanism that is suitable to the technology and growth of a 21st century transportation system. And this time around these aren't the only serious revenue solutions being discussed. Congressman Delaney has a proposal with widespread bipartisan support to fund transportation with attacks on corporate earnings that are currently sitting overseas. Two of my boss's colleagues on the Ways and Means Committee Jim Renacey and Bill Pascrell they've proposed a plan to index the gas tax and create a congressional task force to study long term funding solutions. My boss and I have been really encouraged by the creativity and the bipartisan nature of the conversation around transportation funding and we've only seem to be getting somewhere. The pressure is building for congress to act and building for congress to act in a real way. I'm excited to be here today to hear more about APTA's new report. I'm excited to hear from the panelists about what surface transportation and the expiration means for them. And today we're all part of a national movement to push for action on surface transportation and I look forward to working with all of you going forward to do that. Thank you. Thanks Paul and it's really good to hear about all of the things that are being talked about and being proposed and so if people have specific questions about that you can certainly talk to Paul later in the briefing or afterwards for more information about that. I now want to introduce Michael Milanoffi who is the president and CEO of APTA, the American Public Transportation Association. And it has always been very much of a pleasure to work with him and in his leadership of APTA because he brings so much both enthusiasm for what he is doing and the importance of transportation and transit across this country. But he's also been very, he's been able to articulate in very, very clear ways the important role that transit and transportation overall play across the country and how it means so much to so many different sectors and how we can best address that. And I think that he's able to really do that because of the deep experience that he brings from having run for separate public transit agencies across this country as well as having spent considerable time in the private sector working for bus manufacturers working in the whole private business part of dealing with transportation. So it is my pleasure to introduce Michael to talk about the new information that is out and what is really happening with regard to transit. Thank you so much, Carol. Good afternoon. How y'all doing? Excellent. Thank you for being here today. We certainly appreciate it. Today is a fantastic day at cities large and small all across the country in almost every single state in the nation. We have over 300 organizations over 140 individual events where they are standing up for transportation. Note that I'm saying transportation, not just transit because we're talking about all the transportation modes because this is all about that when it comes to the surface transportation bill. And they are calling on Congress to give us a long term well funded surface transportation. Well, you can see on this great big gigantic slide screen over here that those dots and those lists and I'll read off each one of them one by one now. You can see their events all across the country there in big cities in New York and Chicago and LA there in small towns all across the nation and Grand Rapids, Michigan and the places that is happening tremendous breadth of events. And I want to thank Carol Warner and ESI team for bringing us together today. And I want to thank Congress of Blumenauer and Paul for being here. You always bring great passion to this topic and we certainly appreciate it. And we're so pleased to have the National League of Cities represented here today by the Honorable Emma Jordan, the Mayor of Greenbelt Maryland. Thank you, Mayor Jordan for being here. We certainly appreciate it. And I'm sure you wrote transit to get here. Excellent. And equally pleased, pleased to have our always good friends talking about the public and private partnerships here with the US Chamber of Commerce. And we're so pleased to have drew joining us here today. So thank you for being here drew. And as we look at what's going on with Congress with the administration with the expiration of map 21, as we know so so closely here, we looked at what are we going to do? What message are we going to get across? And our chairman, Phil Washington, the current head of Denver RTD and soon to be the CEO of LA Metro in Los Angeles. He said he wanted to have a national day of local advocacy. And that's the stand up for transportation day. The idea here isn't for us to give a national message all across the nation. It's for local cities, counties, states to show their national, their local perspective on a national issue. So we're doing it from the bottom up, not from the top down. And that's what makes today so exciting. His vision was to partner with different groups around the country. And as we look, we've got governors and mayors and senators and congressmen all across the country right now, as we sit here today that are right now doing events all across the country, we're getting sent emails and tweets and Facebook's of all these different events that are going on and to see those that you all work with and to see that members that where our members are out there working together, telling this very important message, it is so critical. And to see that it's happening, not just on the coast cities, not just in the big six cities in the country, in cities large and small, all across this great map, it is so exciting to see that that message is resonating. So we talked about more than 300 of these groups. It's not just public, it's not just transit agencies saying please give us more money. It's businesses also standing there with them. It's economic development messages, developers standing with them saying we need these investments to build our cities, to build infrastructure, to build equipment and resources standing together in public private partnerships, saying that now, right now, we need these investments in public transportation. Now we all in this room, we know what's going on, we know there are two bills that are coming out that are saying throw transit out of the trust fund. We'll fix the highway program by throwing transit out. Well, it's simply not true. But we need to do more than just say it sounds so serving on the head transit guy, right? Don't don't throw us out. But we created a report we did a study that looks at what are the impacts. If we these programs go away, what are the dollar impacts? What are the projects that are in jeopardy that will disappear in this country as we're trying to bring our economy back? And we've looked at these things. And so we've created this web based tool that allows you to go to your district and see what projects in your district would be at risk. If we were thrown out of the trust fund at the highway bill, no longer had transit as part of the highway trust fund in the mass transit account. So that you can see what projects we will forgo over the next six years, the number of buses that will no longer get purchased and replaced and lead to further degradation of our nation's critical infrastructure system. All the capital projects that would be in jeopardy. You can see a picture here. You see see the bosses there. You see what projects are in the area that are happening and what things would be at risk, both current and new. And a report that's being released at this briefing is a national summary of these district by district impacts. And if no commitment is made to long term federal funding, the analysis shows that proposals to cut federal funding for public transit will result on average in a 43% reduction in the community's overall capital funding investment. Overall federal transit for both capital and operating would be lost, putting at risk more than $227 billion of economic productivity in our nation's economy over the next six years. The loss of federal funds would impact reliability, would impact safety, and would impact the current buses and trains and a service that we put on the nation's roads and rails each and every day. Let me give you some specific numbers. How many buses would be at risk for replacement? 38,000 buses are up for replacement over the next six years. That's 57% of the nation's fleet that wouldn't get replaced, that wouldn't go with new clean technology for propulsion, that wouldn't have new technology for safety and security on board our vehicles. Overall, there are 66 new public transit projects that will be stalled. Many of these projects serves as catalysts for economic development in their regions. And you've seen this all across the country. We've put in bus rapid transit, we've put in street cars and rail lines and commuter rail lines and the economic development, the private sector investment along those corridors that is helping to drive the economic recovery of this country and drives the economic competitiveness of this nation. Rail maintenance, rail expansion, rail car replacement will be significantly impacted if we didn't have these federal funds. Small and rural communities would be adversely affected because of the greater percentage of the funds that comes from the federal government. I'll give you some interesting stats on that in just a moment. These proposals to take transit out of the trust fund are short sighted. Support for public transportation funding initiatives across the nation are as strong as ever. As we look at the partnership, local state and federal government provide 73% of the funds for public transit going to create and support private sector jobs. Because we know the federal government doesn't build the trains, the buses, the transit shelters, the facilities. Those are built by the private sector. And 73% of those dollars that come from the government flow through to the private sector and create jobs all across the country. And Drew is going to talk about some of the economic impact. We must also address our growing public transit ridership. Last year, public transit ridership in this country was 10.8 billion trips. That's the highest ridership number in 58 years. Back when Eisenhower was president and gas was 30 cents a gallon. So let's focus on some of the impact on small towns and rural communities. I'm often asked by members that come from small towns, they say, I see these buses in my town in the middle of the day that are empty. And first, I always say, do you see minivans that are empty in the middle of the day too? And I go, well, yeah, okay, that makes sense. But the reality is a higher percentage of the funding that funds public transportation in small and rural communities comes from the federal share. In 17 states that have the highest proportion of rural residents, they receive 40% or more of their public transportation funding from the federal government. And rural areas are also where you will often find those manufacturers that build the buses and the rail cars that operate around the country built in places like Aniston Alabama, Pemona, North Dakota, Omaha, Nebraska. That's what is infrastructure is being built. With the loss of the federal transit program, it would mean a 13.8 billion dollar hit to rural economies over the next six years. Public transit systems in small towns and rural areas are critical for all of America, and particularly for those with disabilities and those without an alternative form of transportation. This greatly impacts rural residents access to jobs, to health care and to schools. Things that are so important to all of us as Americans. Congressional inaction is also contributing to the severe backlog in state of good repair. You all know the numbers. You can say it with me. 88 billion dollar backlog in state of good repair right now in this country in transportation infrastructure. We must address this. Our boldest, our boldest and our most heavily used systems, places like Boston, New York, Chicago, have major needs for investment to replace their vehicles, to replace their aging infrastructure. It's just not about old buses and trains and signals and bridges. It's about the safety and it's about the economic impact of keeping those systems running safe, reliable on time every single time. We know that clock is ticking. We know we only have 52 days left before the expiration of the current map 21 legislation. The time for action is now. And that's why all of our members are out with your members in district right now sharing that message on a local level. And in talking about the importance of repairing and investing in railroads, bridges, buses and other infrastructure. So I look forward to the discussion hearing remarks from the Honorable Mayor Jordan from Drew Preston and others. We thank you so much for being here. It's so important that we get this message out. Now is the time this country needs good public transportation infrastructure investment. And thank you for your participation today. Thanks, Michael. And I would just mentioned that this information is will be up on EESI's website as well as obviously on Aptis website. And last night we were just looking a little bit at this web tool to really look at how you could look across the country in terms of different states, different communities, different kinds of projects. And it's actually very cool. And so I really, really encourage you to really delve into it and to look at it because it really brings another whole important perspective to it when you can really see it across the country. And so please do take advantage of that. And I think it's so important too in terms of making sure you check out those maps and that information with regard to supply chains because everybody has so many stakes with regard to thinking about how how transportation is embedded in literally everything that we do and we so often just take it for granted. So I now am very pleased to turn to Mayor Emmett Jordan. He is a current member of the Greenbelt City Council serving as mayor there. He brings a lot of experience in terms of managing all kinds of projects. He has history of working for a number of different kinds of nonprofit organizations, different associations, including the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian and also doing private contracting work. And he comes from Ohio, but moved to Maryland about 12 years ago and has become the mayor there. And as mayor, he is also very, very active in the National League of Cities and serves on the Economic Development Committee of NLC. And so he brings a very important voice and perspective to us today since local government is where so many things have to happen. Thank you very much, Carol. Hopefully I'll bring a strong local voice. I'm a little bit taller than Carol, so I have to But good morning. My name is Emmett Jordan. I'm mayor of the city of Greenbelt. I serve on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments here in Washington, D.C. And I'm here today as representative of the National League of Cities where I've served as a steering committee member for the Community and Economic Development Subcommittee. So I'm really honored to be able to fill in and to represent NLC here to kind of laud APTA and ESI on the release of this report and actually participate in this important event. NLC is, of course, the national membership and advocacy organization for city officials and serves as a resource for the 19,000 cities, large and small towns and villages across the country, representing 218 million Americans. Local government is where things get done. And when you talk about transportation needs, when you talk about moving people around a city like Greenbelt, which is a first tier suburb of a metropolitan area, we're a small city, about 24,000 people, and we're outside of the Washington, D.C. area. So our fate, our economic vitality is tied so closely with the rest of the metropolitan area. As a member of the board of our metropolitan planning organization, COG, we recently were presented a report on infrastructure needs in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. And as Michael was pointing out, this notion of state of good repair is something that's very, very important. And in the report on the state of infrastructure in Washington, D.C., it was projected that there was a close to a 16 billion dollar shortfall over the next 15 years in Washington, D.C. Now, this is not just roads. It's the transit system, WMATA. It's rail. It's bridges. And these are all things for small towns, cities, suburbs, rural America. I mean, we're all tied together. And when you look at our economies, when you look at our ability to our property values, they're so tied up in transportation. In Maryland, there's a light rail project that we're struggling to move forward. The purple line, which will connect New Carrollton, Maryland with Bethesda. And it's an essential east-west connection. And at the cog, the Metropolitan Planning Organization, as we try and look at these regional issues, a long-term perspective, we have to look out 10, 15 years at the constrained realities of where our funding is coming from. And it's impossible to do, you know, as we go from year to year, not really knowing if the Transportation Trust Fund and the funding is going to be there. It makes it just about impossible to really plan out. So when you talk about transportation, you're talking about economics. For us, transportation is a partnership. In my small town, we have local roads. We have roads that are actually state highways. And we have, you know, interstate highways. One roadway that goes through Greenbelt is the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. And it's an example of the kind of partnerships, funding partnerships we have to try and manage, because the Parkway is maintained by the National Park Service and because they actually subcontract maintenance to the Federal Highway Authority, we have to struggle when there are potholes and whatnot. You know, we have to take the complaints and the problems from potholes. And we ask and we ask and we ask, and we can't really, we don't have a lot of control over a lot of the funding, transportation funding issues that we deal with. And yet we're the ones that are held accountable. You know, we have to serve our constituents. We have to make it possible for people to get around. So this idea of small towns and how they relate to the federal government is really, really complicated because we are so dependent on partnerships and being able to work with the state and the federal government. And with so much uncertainty, it's just really, really, really difficult. So transit needs are changing and as more and more people are riding in hybrid cars and as we want to make it easier for people to get around, bicyclists and pedestrians, my town, Greenbelt, is very, very proud of our heritage as being a very, very walkable community. And we want to enhance to make it easy for people to ride bikes to be able to get around. So in local government throughout Prince George's County and the state of Maryland and throughout the region, we talk a lot about complete streets, being able to kind of transition away from just highways but also taking into account the needs of pedestrians and cyclists. And so once again, it comes down to funding. We have plans. There are things that our people, our residents tell us that they want to do and need to do. And once again, we're sort of dependent on the funding and with so much uncertainty, it's just you can't do anything if you don't know what's going to happen four or five years out down the line. So I guess the investments by the federal government, they need to reflect the new reality of what people want to do, riding bikes, walking, being more healthy. So, you know, this this renewal of map the map 21 funding and the Highway Trust Fund, we really, really are looking for some certainty and not these constant short term renewals. It's just crippling our ability to plan. So I think that's all I wanted to share today. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Congratulations. Thank you very much, Mayor. And I think that you said it as well as what one can in terms of the challenges that you have to face because your constituents expect you to deliver, right? And so we are now going to hear from Duke Preston, who's a manager for congressional and public affairs with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And in that capacity, Duke works closely with all of you in terms of congressional offices as well as federal agencies with regard to the host of legislative and regulatory affairs on all on all manners of transportation in terms of all the different sectors of transportation as well as water infrastructure. And I think that we will also be hearing from him in terms of thinking about the whole role of our economy and what it means to businesses across the country in terms of this important piece of infrastructure. Drew, welcome. Good afternoon. Thanks for ESI for having us. Always happy to be here apt, good friend, partner. So I'm here on behalf of the Chamber on behalf of the American business community to talk about the importance of transportation to businesses, the importance of transportation to the economy. It's really very simple. There is no economy without transportation. It just doesn't work that way. There are no businesses without transportation infrastructure. It doesn't matter what your business is, what sector you're in. You know, we talk about the economy in very abstract terms, a lot of the time, consumption, is it growing, is it shrinking. But transportation infrastructure is where the economy lives. It is the physical platform on which all of this is built. If you think of the internet, I mean, it's inconceivable now to think of pre-internet. You know, and think of what the internet has done to commerce. I mean, imagine going back and buying something before the internet. It's almost, like I say, it's inconceivable. The internet likewise, it actually has to live somewhere. It lives in computers, it lives on servers, it lives in wires in the ground. It doesn't just hang out in the air somewhere. So the transportation infrastructure is the very same for the economy as a whole. Even if you don't have a car, if you don't drive, people say, well, I don't drive. Why should I pay for transportation? Everything in your house, your house, everything in this room, every stitch of clothing on you, the phone in your pocket, the room itself got here on transportation. There would be nothing around us, not this podium, anything without transportation. So it's really hard to overstate its impact, and Carol said it best. It's really out of sight, out of mind for a lot of folks. It's so integrated with our everyday lives, we don't really pay any attention to it. The chamber is multimodal. A lot of my members are multimodal in how they move things across the country. But, you know, most people are aware of surface transportation. We're talking map 21 today, surface transportation. Again, even if you don't own a car, most of you have been in a car. You've been on a road, presumably. If you're not a pilot, commercial airline pilot, presumably you've been in an airplane. I don't know if anyone took a steamship to Europe recently. Water is really often sort of the worst out of sight, out of mindless. You're commuting to work via barge, or you have a Mississippi River running through your backyard. You really probably don't pay attention to water and how much water moves. It moves a lot. A lot of stuff. You know, if we're talking about transportation and the economy, it's really important to do sort of a cost-benefit analysis, right? And I've jotted down some numbers because they're very big numbers. In a lot of cases, when we talk about the benefits of transportation, 300 million Americans use the transportation system to access every part of their lives from jobs to markets where they're trying to acquire goods or sell goods back to, their health care services, recreational activities, all is accessed via transportation. The U.S. freight network alone, it moves 52 million tons per day. That's 46 billion dollars of goods every single day. It does not take recess. It does not take lunch breaks every day. It's really moving these amount of goods. If you look at international tourism, it's a major intensive user of transportation. People coming to the country, it generated 181 billion dollars in 2013. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. It's not just the level of economic output. It's geographic. I mean, Chicago really became Chicago because it was this hub between the bread basket of the country and the markets in the Northeast and abroad. It impacts home prices. Access to transit was probably the largest determining factor in where I bought my home in D.C. Could I get to work every day on public transportation? There's research that shows home values raised if it improves cost of living. And again, how you access that system. But unfortunately, we're neglecting it like most things. Total percentage of investment as a percentage of GDP has fallen over the last 20 years. That is different from the rest of the developing world certainly. They are racing ahead of us. The World Economic Forum now puts us at 18th. We were previously at 7th in terms of the quality of our roads. So this stuff matters. And again, going back to the sort of cost-benefit analysis. A lot of talk in the press of late of the cost of this stuff. A lot of your Hill staff presumably talking about the cost. How much is it going to cost? How are we going to pay for all this stuff? That's really the wrong cost figure to be looking at because sort of the costs of inaction far, far, far outweigh what this will actually cost to fix. And that's really what I'm here to talk about. The cost of businesses. So U.S. businesses logistics costs. In 2013, again, the most recent data I have, $1.4 trillion, that's trillion with a T. That's 8.2% of our GDP. That's a lot of money that companies spend on logistics costs. American businesses pay 27 billion extra a year in freight costs due to shipping delays and raising prices on everyday products. The trucking industry alone, highway bottlenecks cause them more than 240 million hours of delays each year. That's about $7.8 billion annually. Looking at company specific costs, general mills for every one mile reduction in speed on their logistics supply chain is $2 million in added logistics costs. You look at UPS. If UPS, if every UPS driver is delayed five minutes, that's $100 million annually to UPS, $100 million for one company. Nike spends an additional $4 million per week to manage additional inventory due to shipping delays. Caterpillar, I could go down the list, millions and millions of dollars as well if infrastructure delays add just an extra couple of days to their shipping costs. In the most recent quarterly survey of 1,000 C-suite executives from mid-market companies, a full 83% of those executives said U.S. infrastructure has a large impact on their businesses. Going back to travel industry, U.S. Travel Association surveyed their members. 93% of their members surveyed said that greater investments in infrastructure are needed, 74% saying it's extremely important to their business. But it's not just businesses that this is costing, families too. All of these added costs on business end up out of your pocket as well. When you go to the store again, everything you buy, those extra costs are resulting from extra logistics costs. If you look at the 90% of Americans below the top 10% of income distribution, so the bulk of the country may include it certainly. Transportation costs can absorb one out of every $7 they bring in. It's almost twice as expensive for the bottom 90% as it is for the top 10%. Americans spend on average $5.5 billion hours billion hours in traffic each year. They waste almost $3 billion gallons of gas doing so. That's a lot of fuel. It's about $120 billion worth of time in fuel. Those numbers are projected to rise to $8.4 billion hours and $4.5 billion gallons of gas by 2020. The average motorist pays approximately $375 a year to fix their car due to potholes and these other traffic issues. Again, I think ARPA recently broke down what would it increase? What would congressmen Blumenauer's increase cost the average American per year? It's about $88 per year. That's what the gas tax increase is. His boss is proposing what cost average $88 per year. We'll weigh that against, again, $375 on average. And that's just the average for many metropolitan areas that's far higher. LA is almost $1,000. But it's not just cost to your car. It's personal safety. There's almost 30,000 traffic related fatalities and they think a third of those, a solid third of those, are the result of poor roads, poor infrastructure. That's unacceptable. That would be the equivalent of a commercial airliner dropping out of the sky every week. That's just not acceptable. But somehow that's become so normal we're just willing to kind of, well, that's what it is, I guess. So all of this is important. It's very, very important to businesses. It's very important to our members. It's very important to the U.S. economy. And we need to stop kicking the can down the road. I think why now, as Paul stated, we've had a lot of extensions. Any small business owners in the audience or big business owners? Any billionaires in the audience? Well, it doesn't matter the size of your business. If it's you have 100,000 employees, businesses don't plan every day. The CEO doesn't wake up each morning and think, okay, how's today going to look? They plan years and decades in advance. And that's why they need to know if this transportation system is going to be there, it's going to be serving their business and serving the economy for that many years in advance. What is it going to cost them? They need that certainty. This is above and beyond just the people who actually build infrastructure. That's a whole different bucket of things. Construction firms multi-billion dollar, multi-million dollar construction projects are not like a light switch. You can't just shut them on and off and pick them back up again. That creates a lot, a lot of cost overruns. You have to get everyone back to the site. You have to get all the equipment back to the site. If the winner hits, you have to stop the construction altogether and wait for the spring to come back. That adds significantly to all these construction costs exacerbating the very problem we're trying to solve. It's really mind-boggling, to be perfectly honest. So we're talking about the importance, we're talking about how much money it costs. Well, delaying investment is not reducing that cost far from it. It's multiplying it many times over. So I think it's time to do something about it. In terms of the federal role, it's another point I wanted to touch on. A lot of talk at the moment. A sort of devolution devolving the program back to the states is a very popular talking point at the moment. That's just ridiculous to be perfectly honest. It's absolutely ridiculous. The U.S. has a long history from our absolute founding. The federal government has been involved in transportation. It's in the Constitution. It's in Article 1 of the Constitution. The importance of the federal government's role in transportation. Regulating interstate commerce. I mean, yes, we are 50 states and we're always striking the balance between federal power and state power, but we operate in the global economy as one country still. We are not the EU. Look at the problems the EU is having, frankly. Especially if you're trying, like many of my members come to get goods across this country, the entire country. Many of my members, they come in every port. They use every road. They use every rail. They need to view that system as a whole. They don't want to have to stop in Florida and Georgia and Alabama and think, well, what is their system like? And how do I navigate that? It's incredibly cost prohibitive. It's also prohibitive for investment. We talk a lot at the chamber about private investment. This isn't just about public money. There's a lot of private money out there. And it's about apps and services. Licking its chops at coming to this country and helping to pay for our infrastructure. I can't tell you how much of my time is being taken up recently about companies and countries looking at the US. They see our needs. They see the federal government's willingness to pay for a lot of this stuff, ability to pay for this stuff. There's a real opportunity there, but it is a huge deterrent for them to get here and think, well, I'm coming to the US discover I'm sorry you're actually doing business with 50 state governments if you want to invest in water infrastructure wastewater clean water it's really more like 20,000 municipalities you'll be doing business with that's a huge turnoff there are entire countries who have written us off all together because it's too cost prohibitive for them to come here and invest in US infrastructure so this is something we need to fix and I you know I'm frustrated by the sort of talking point of well there's no real political public willpower I mean I think as Michael say look at the look at the events across the country today alone I mean I think that's a pretty clear signal of the public wanting to do something about this you know members need to be held accountable Washington needs to be held accountable you don't get to just suck at your job and then leave I mean that's not how it works to be perfectly honest this is something that again we've spent a long time developing and we need to we need to maintain it so that's all happy to take questions sorry if that wasn't too pessimistic but and we're glad that Drew talked about exactly how he felt about the whole thing right and and and obviously he's reflecting what he hears every day from chamber members across the country so let's open it up for any questions or comments and we have a microphone back here and if you'd please identify yourself please question okay right over here I arrived too late I missed a couple or one of the presenters I'm sorry no questions for Mr. Boogner's staff Mr. Preston I have a question for you it was interesting to me that you outlined the importance in fact the constitutional imperative of interstate commerce being a federal responsibility and at one point you suggested you didn't necessarily want to talk about how to fund and then you went along to enumerate member of your associations members costs because of kind of a haphazard random infrastructure that we have in the country and because it's a constitutional imperative and because it cost your members and others so much if there were not to be a long term financial plan it seemed to me you made a very good argument for general funding of transportation and infrastructure and I don't know that I've ever heard that the Chamber of Commerce come out for that but I'd be glad to be told today that they're in favor of general funding if if necessary of that's that's one question and then I had a question for the mayor with regard to the instance where there's a national road running through a local municipality and the fund repeated asks to fix the potholes whether it be the Park Service or the Federal Highway Administration not responding to those repeated asks why would not the local municipality just fill the potholes itself and build the federal government but those would be much questions thank you so no the Chamber is supportive of the user pays model economically we feel it's the most efficient way to connect the users of the good with the good itself the trust fund model has served us well for a very long time the fuel tax has served us well for a very long time is it the solution for the next 100 years probably not we'll have to look at something else if it's a mileage based user fee or whatever it will be but we still see a lot of value in the user pays model keeping that within transportation the problem with general funds of course is it throws you into the same large pot as many other very important national priorities I mean I don't want infrastructure pitted against research and development scientific research foreign aid I mean so you know it's it's difficult because we do feel strongly enough in the federal responsibility but in terms of the way Washington doles out its money general fund is probably not preferable thanks for your question you are asking why why local governments don't take take the initiative and if there's a pothole on a interstate highway that runs through a jurisdiction why doesn't the local government come out and patch the pothole well there's a few reasons for that number one we simply don't have the resources our resources are very very constrained and we also plan very far ahead local government particularly municipalities we don't have the tools when it when it comes to raising revenue that actually take on that responsibility at the same time we are held accountable for that I've read about instances where local governments have actually been lawsuits have been filed to try and you know get funding back for a pothole breaks the suspension so you know it's it's a difficult difficult situation to be in when you have the accountability but you really don't have the resources to be able to respond hi a very good panel Carol Andy Patterson with environmental business international certainly the transportation bill is job one but let's broaden the conversation for the whole panel to state and muni finance because that's kind of fallen off the table since the financial crisis down from 350 billion a year to 200 billion a year how do you see that unfolding from here how does it fit into the picture Michael Emmett drew I understand cities are constrained but you've got to have a message about what you're going to do with the debt markets not just the transportation bill has to be a broader discussion I'll be happy to start off with that and and appreciate the question Andy it takes a multitude of players to make these things work when we look at Denver Union Station tremendous economic development that's driven into Denver 11 different funding and financing partners went into building that and certainly public transportation infrastructure is a partnership there's the federal government plays a role about 43 percent on average of the capital funding needs states in most places play a role of local municipalities whether through states through local sales taxes or Edvalorum taxes contributes significantly and obviously the passengers that pay every day when they get on and pay that fare we can't move everything to a financing model we have to pay for these things and certainly as we look at PPPs there's a place for them and I think Mr. de Fazio had an analysis done to figure out between 9 and 12 percent of the infrastructure projects could probably fit into a PPP model but something like when you've got to build a new bus garage there's no revenue stream to pay back that the funding for that asset so it doesn't work as a PPP model and as we look at the global space that is truly how PPPs work those that play in the big way play on an international level on a global level as they look at the US with certainly cities that are challenged sometimes with many places with the funding caps on what they can do for financing as they run into capacity limits you know where they put those funds I put them into you know sewer water infrastructure other things they run into those caps we look at those public-private partnerships with a myriad of 50 different state regulations some of prohibit PPP projects there's a very high risk quotient for doing PPPs in the US much more so than even places like Canada and Australia that have national programs and so we are as attractive as other countries might be so we have to look at this there's a lot of different parts to it and there's a whole other discussion we can have on international funding and finance and how we fit into that but just having local governments bond against future revenues and try to solve our infrastructure problems that isn't the right solution for sure thanks for the question and mayor perhaps you want to jump in on a mayoral perspective well I could just say that that question about municipal bond funding another one of NLC's priorities is trying to protect the deductibility of municipal bonds or some questions about that so it's something we're really really concerned with the you know fixed and dams water project water infrastructure projects and bridges that that deductibility of municipal bonds makes all the difference in the world I think I think Michael covered it very well I mean I would just echo in terms of it's it's really we need the full menu of options really that absolutely needs to be part of it look states and localities they don't have the luxury of running deficits like the federal government can so they often have been the real innovators in how we're paying for a lot of stuff because they have to be and I think there's a big question right now at the federal level about what can the federal government do or should it be doing to help further open that market to private investment but that that absolutely has to be a big piece of it I'm Bob Bartolo from senator Casey's office so the CMAC funding the congestion mitigation and air quality funding for compliance for the Clean Air Act is folded into map 21 and people didn't touch on that so much but I just I'm curious is your perspective for using CMAC funding and the map 21 funding for the environment for clean air and and what role like some of the cities and states and businesses are playing for advocating for clean fueling infrastructure across the nation namely say natural gas or hydrogen or charging infrastructure across our interstate system CMAC funding has been a critical tool that's been used by communities across the nation obviously for doing you know kind of initially pilot projects to say does it make sense to run this commuter line as a alternate to having a congested freeway or other projects like that CMAC has been a great catalyst for getting things off the ground and establishing the need for different types of services has done a fantastic job as we look at but it's just one tool of many in that portfolio the alternative fuel question great question we're seeing it across the country we have a over third number now about 38% of our fleet across the country right now in public transportation is hybrid or alternative fuel and we're seeing obviously economics are driving now with the cost differential between CNG compressed natural gas and diesel fuel that's driving that even further and we're seeing cities across the nation that are going all alternative fuel and I was just out in LA the last couple of days they're even moving to the next stage they're going from taking their all CNG fleets moving them to portions of them are all electric in their fleets and so we're seeing a very rapid evolution one of these remember there too has transit's been the place where they often do the innovative development of these things when you look at hybrid cars hybrid car started with hybrid buses because the hybrid systems were so there's big as your table they didn't fit in the car so they started with the bus fleets and then migrated into into the automobiles so there's a lot of good work going on there alternative fuels and we're really proud of those efforts across the country we can supply that data we've got data of what that looks like all across the country so great question thank you so much for being here okay great go ahead hi great great panel great discussion one of the things I wanted to ask if you could talk about a little bit more is so often when we hear about transit in the highway trust fund we hear about you know what is the farmer in North Dakota care about you know transit funding why should they be paying for that truckers talk about well we need to spend that money on interstate highways why shouldn't you know we be paying for transit I'm wondering if you can deliver a message of why it's important to those folks to fund transit how does it impact them even though it might be right not not right in front of their face every day I was wondering if you can talk about that a little bit well I'll start off first I'm thanks for throwing out North Dakota as someone who used to run a bus manufacturing plant in North Dakota one of the largest employers in the state I can tell you the impact of that I had I had 3,000 supply supply vendors that supported that factory and so when I was building buses for New York or Miami or LA or Seattle was putting high paying high quality jobs into a very rural community 600 people lived in that town 300 of them worked for us the other ones went to school and I think two of them worked at the gas station so it's but this isn't a unique story in North Dakota it's happening all across the country look you don't build your buses and rail cars in the middle of your downtown area there's no bus plant down K Street here you build them in these rural communities all across the country look at the supply base the family owned businesses that build the wiring harnesses the fabrics the seats the flooring the windows are scattered all across this nation and so you may say why am I supporting funding to put infrastructure into New York City well where do you think all those infrastructure comes from all that expertise it comes from across the nation and we are creating high quality good paying good benefit jobs it's high technology as we're building all electric buses that have inductive charging don't even touch anything comes up through the ground and then charges these vehicles this is innovative stuff that's happening that's when it was in you know Greensboro South Carolina Pamela or Tacona and San Alabama you know Oklahoma this stuff is happening all across the country and it's it there's a good message there this stuff really does all hit all 435 districts across the country well just I'd go back to the system as a whole I mean you know New Yorkers could make the same argument why should they be paying for North Dakota's roads to be perfectly honest and again for my members it's part of a cohesive system metropolitan areas are a major major economic driver for the country so a lot of our economic output generates from so we think that's pretty important transit's a big piece of that absolutely I'm getting that grain to market right that's exactly right and no I'll chime in real quick and I mean if we're talking about the growth of this nation a hundred million people twice as much freight movement by 2050 I mean it's inconceivable to think of that moving all those people and goods on the network that we have so what we need to think about doing is how we can get more value out of the system that we have and that means investing in transit and and other forms of transportation not just roads great well I would also be curious in terms of for example you're up here a lot Drew what are you hearing when you talk about this to members to members and staff you know I always feel like the pessimists in the room transportation you know I think a lot of us are the same way you know I'm hearing a lot of private agreement to be perfectly honest so it doesn't matter how Senate public and Democrat I don't think there has been historically quite this broad agreement on transportation in some time I mean it's truly amazing everyone's talking about transportation everyone has finally bought into the importance of transportation we're just hung up on how to pay for it and again I'd go back to my remarks about the costs and weighing the sort of well what's the price tag for the bill versus the cost of the economy and the cost of businesses those costs don't like score by CBO or JCT I mean that's not how that works so you know and again I hear a lot of well we can't sell this back home I mean I think I've lost count of how much I've heard that line you know well I am you know and I'm glad the League of Cities certainly is here again look at the number of events around the country going on at the moment I mean I think back home people care about this if you look at the states who have passed local or state transportation investment measures there are a lot of them they're red states and their blue states so I think a real groundswell is is upon us and no time is right the economy is still not on great footing now is not the time to really sort of remove one of the biggest economic drivers we have far from it now's the time to increase investment in that so and it is pretty alarming in terms of what you were saying as far as the world ranking for the for US transportation infrastructure has perceived Michael did you want to add to any of that and I had one last question that I also wanted to ask you that as you have been seeing all of these communities rise up and talk about how critical these needs are to really making things work and to run and as you've talked to media who are covering these kinds of events what what are the questions what what seems to make a difference in terms of dealing with reporters what what do they see as being the key questions that should be answered here's one of the most important things I think to touch on it and I appreciate asking the question when we were we were kids many of the members of Congress were kids we had a binary choice for transfer or took transit you did one of the two and people didn't live in our downtowns and they lived in the suburbs and they drove it just well they took transit one of the two that's not what our economy is now it has changed dramatically we have many millennials when you're in the room you live in the downtown areas baby boomers also in the room you are moving back into downtowns we are living a lifestyle I live car free here in DC we want choices now you can take a shared-use car a shared-use bike a bus to train a trolley all in the same week it's okay to have a car you know once a place on the weekends do that I use a zip car to do that but to have all these choices and that's the real economy that's what's happening now that's what our communities are driving that's what they're demanding as businesses come as they meet with mayors and they say hey I want to bring my business to town one of the top five questions they ask is tell me about your transportation infrastructure can I get good people to come work for my company can I attract them to your livability of my community can I get them in a safe reliable dependable way to and from work every single day when you think about what our cities look like 20 years ago they were very domestic in how they looked there were people that were from that area that worked and live there look at our cities now they're very very international and our industries are that way our country is that way our global competitive is dependent on that and so we have to look at the needs for transportation infrastructure and our investment in our country through this lens of what's happening now and where are we going what's changing that we are positioned to have good transportation choices as our economy changes as everyone moves many people move back into our downtown areas we won't be able to compete in those cities that don't have it will be left behind that pretty fair Mary and we want him to be able to continue as a mayor right so I want to thank all of you for being here for this terrific panel and I also want to make sure that you know that after has left the new report that there's information out on this the sign-in table outside so be sure to pick that up when you leave and also be sure to check out this web tool that after developed because I think you'll find it very very interesting and hopefully it will spur everybody to a greater understanding and an action thank you all right thank you Paul thank you Carol thank you may