Obama's war on infrastructure

[Quantum Windbag]

The feds can't tell the difference between an airport and a coal mine, and people wonder why intelligent people think there are too many regulations.

Officials from two Southwestern Virginia counties say a project vital to the area’s economic development has been held up for years because of a dispute with federal regulators over what is an airport and what is a coal mine.Local leaders say the three-year battle with the U.S. Office of Surface Mining over plans to extend the runway at Grundy Municipal Airport has cost taxpayers in this poverty-stricken corner of Appalachia millions of dollars in lost opportunities, and a list of regulatory hurdles remains before construction can even begin.
“We were attempting to permit this project as an airport project, not a coal-mining project,” said state Sen. Phillip P. Puckett, a Democrat from Lebanon who has been involved for three years with the effort to lengthen the runway from 2,200 feet to more than 5,000 feet — the length needed to comply with insurance standards for corporate jets. The holdup: Federal regulators have refused to allow the runway project to go forward without a mining permit because of the coal deposits below the land that will be dug up during construction.
“That’s where the permitting process got caught up — in determining whether it was an airport project or a mining project, by the Office of Surface Mining in Washington,” Mr. Puckett said. “We’ve tried to resolve that with them for the last couple of years. We’ve had very little success.”

‘Coal mine’ stalls small Virginia airport runway’s takeoff - Washington Times

 

[waltky]

Congress eyeing new fees or tax hikes for road and bridge repair...

Congress looks for road repair funds
2/20/13: Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are looking at new fees or tax hikes to generate money to patch up the nation’s highways and bridges in an attempt to avoid another session of kicking the can down the proverbial crumbling road.

The poor state of the nation’s outdated infrastructure has become a familiar story with the public, but few believe Washington is serious about addressing it. Just 30 percent of those surveyed in a recent Gallup Poll said the president and Congress will make fixing roads a priority. The only policy area believed to be less of a priority was global warming. That skepticism comes from the belief that Washington won’t be able take on transit and highway repairs without addressing the vexing revenue question. And since polls show public resistance to raising the two-decade-old 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax rate, politicians are afraid to touch it.

But that fee, which is expected to yield $44 billion this year, doesn’t pay for what Congress spends on transport infrastructure. So in order to avoid dipping into the general fund, politicians will have to get creative. They also need to act fast: The Congressional Budget Office estimates an addtional $21 billion in revenue will be needed just to keep spending levels flat for two years after the transportation law expires in 2014. Even the respected bipartisan duo of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who recommended in 2010 that the government crank up the gas tax by a penny a month for two years, got no traction. After three years of being ignored by President Barack Obama and Hill leaders, Tuesday’s new Simpson-Bowles 2.0 plan only suggested that lawmakers bring spending and revenue in line — no specifics.

Political momentum is building behind a distance-based fee for drivers, but privacy issues and technology concerns mean any per-mile charge is probably too far down the road, so Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio, the top Democrat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s Highways and Transit panel, has been crunching numbers on more viable options with full committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.). DeFazio favors a slow and steady increase in the gas tax — which can be leveraged through a 20-year bond issue to cover near-term spending needs. Rather than only gradually increasing federal transportation spending by a few percentage points annually, he hopes a bond on future proceeds would deliver more than $100 billion upfront, an idea that could win public support by putting thousands of people to work, easing the sting from a 1-cent to 2-cents-per-gallon increase per year.

That would have a “minuscule impact on people,” DeFazio said. “I drive to a gas station on the way to work, and they’re jacking up the price by 10 cents a gallon.” According to DeFazio’s office, tying the gas tax to the consumer price index would bring $50 billion over 10 years, while pegging it to the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Cost Construction Index would yield $150 billion over the same period. “There would be acceptance of something as modest as that if [people] also knew what the benefits were going to be. That’s why I wouldn’t just propose increasing it, and then letting it creep up. My proposal goes further,” DeFazio explained. “That could be $120 [billion], $140 billion upfront into the [Highway] Trust Fund right now to begin to deal with the backlog of projects. And people would see construction activity everywhere in America.”

Read more: Congress looks for road repair funds - Burgess Everett - POLITICO.com

 

[TheOldSchool]

Nothing to do with Obama.

 

[TheSeventhTiger]

whats the point of building or upgrading roads when Obama caused so many businesses on those roads to shut down? then we will have all of these new roads lined with 1/2 empty strip malls and empty office buildings.