Vermont will fare “extraordinarily well,” under the terms of the federal transportation reauthorization bill enacted last week, according to Josh Miller-Lewis, spokesman for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who backed the five-year, $305 billion measure.
The new law, known as FAST (Fixing America’s Surface Transportation) Act, ensures a steady stream of federal aid for routine highway projects and certain mass transit projects. Some discretionary grant programs, however, were not funded this year in the annual appropriation bill that Congress passed on Dec. 18.
The FAST Act authorizes the disbursement of $1.1 billion to Vermont for highways and mass transit over the next five years. The money will come from the federal Highway Trust Fund, which is funded through federal fuel tax receipts.
In all, $207 billion of such “formula funds” will be distributed for highways nationwide. Vermont will receive more than 0.5 percent of the total outlay, even though the state’s population is less than 0.2 percent of the nation’s.
That generous treatment originated in 2005, when Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords, a member of the committee drafting the legislation, obtained special earmarks for the state, as part of the multi-year surface-transportation reauthorization Congress passed that year. The legislation also contained more than a dozen separate formulas for computing each state’s share of HTF-sourced highway funding.
In 2012, when earmarks had in effect been banned and Sanders had taken Jeffords’ place on the committee, Congress consolidated the formulas, added in each state’s earmarks from 2005, and created a new, single formula that gave Vermont’s transportation program a bigger boost than it would have received under a per capita calculation.
“Now that the FAST Act is here, we’ve locked [that formula] in for another five years,” Sanders aide David Weinstein told VTDigger.
“We made the argument that northern, rural states have stresses on their infrastructure that other states don’t,” he said. “Arizona may be growing faster than Vermont, but they don’t have to deal with frost heaves or corrosion from heavy salting.”
Preserving Vermont’s advantageous cut of the funds is a victory for the state.
“Maintaining our share of funds under the FAST Act was our goal, and we achieved that goal,” Vermont transportation secretary Chris Cole said in an interview. “It was a very strong effort on the part of our congressional delegation.”
Weinstein says the most important feature of the legislation “is that for the first time since 2005, this is a long-term transportation authorization. It allows the state of Vermont and municipalities to plan ahead, and to have funding certainty.”
Until it passed the FAST bill, Congress had approved of three dozen short-term “patches” to keep federal transportation money flowing. Some of those fill-ins lasted only a matter of weeks.
1,301 Pages with Lots of Maybes
The FAST Act has two major elements. The highway and mass transit funding paid out of the HTF, which is financed primarily by a tax on fuels, accounts for about $273 billion, with a highway account getting 80 percent and a mass transit account 20 percent of that sum. The remainder of the legislation’s $305 billion grand total consists largely of money for grant programs whose annual financing is subject to congressional discretion.
Unlike the federal legislation on surface transportation, the 1,301-page statute includes a title – 209 pages of it – on railroads, and targets a good hunk of funding for rail. The money includes, for example, a discretionary grant program, with an authorization of just under $1 billion over five years, aimed at bringing passenger rail infrastructure into a state of good repair; and another program, with $100 million authorized, to expand Amtrak’s route network.
VTrans spokesman Erik Filkorn said Friday that the state intended to seek grants from the state of good repair program and the network-expansion fund. In addition, the state will apply for funding for capital investments in buses and bus facilities.
Cole said that Vermont would seek funds from the network-expansion program – if Congress funded it – to help extend both the Ethan Allen Express from Rutland to Burlington, and the Vermonter from St. Albans to Montreal. Vermont helps sponsor both trains.
“There are things that appear in reauthorization bills that never get funded,” Cole said.
But neither the route-expansion initiative nor the state of good repair program got a dime when Congress passed the budget bill Dec. 18. Transportation departments now have to wait until fiscal year 2017 for funding.
Sean Jeans-Gail, vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group National Association of Railroad Passengers, said the timing – with just two weeks between enactment of the FAST Act and the budget bill – played a role in the omission of grant funding from the legislation.
“I don’t think the new structure had the time really to make an impression,” he said. “We’ll miss out this year.”
So What’s Under the Christmas Tree?
By contrast, the bus program Vermont is counting on will be funded from the Highway Trust Fund revenue stream rather than discretionary funds.
Another transportation initiative that made it through the federal legislative mill for the 2016 fiscal year is the National Infrastructure Investment program, which lies outside the FAST Act’s scope. In a slightly different format, the program has proven one of the most popular federal transportation funding sources in Montpelier and around the country. Since its inception in 2009, the program has provided more than $32 million to Vermont for projects ranging from the reconstruction of St. Albans’ Main Street to upgrades to the state’s Western Rail Corridor.
The $500 million appropriated for the program nationwide might provide Vermont with an alternative to the unfunded state of good repair initiative for rail. VTrans did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what the federal budgeting decisions will mean.
But the FAST Act is not limited to money issues. It also adds no shortage of new regulations to the federal lawbook – mandates that can translate into opportunities and reference points for the states. The law allows VTrans to apply federal highway funding to a broader range of road projects and requires the U.S. Department of Transportation to study “an impairment standard for drivers under the influence of marijuana” – a matter recently addressed at a series of State Transportation Board forums.
The law also instructs Amtrak to establish, by next June, a pilot program for passenger-rail-sponsoring states such as Vermont “to facilitate onboard purchase and sale of local food and beverage products.”
“If they were going to start allowing Vermont products on those routes, I think it’d be fabulous for our brand,” Megan Smith, commissioner of the Department of Tourism and Marketing, commented, referring to the Vermonter and Ethan Allen Express. “We’re going to follow up.”
In the days ahead, Smith and other state officials will continue to see what the FAST Act and the federal budget bill have – and haven’t – left under the Christmas tree.
