Federal Funding

Connecticut state senators just voted to increase the state gas tax by three cents. The New Hampshire House Speaker has proposed cutting theirs by five cents – but only for two months, to help drivers bear the pain of high gas prices. In Georgia, the gas tax jumps every time gas prices go up by 25 cents. And at least one U.S. Senator is suggesting that more states start taking transportation funding into their own hands.

It’s rescission time again, folks. That Washington lingo for “gimme gimme.” We had a name for people who “rescinded” gifts back in elementary school but it’s ethnically insensitive so I won’t say it. Suffice it to say, if little kids call you a name for doing something, it’s probably not a super popular thing to be doing.

With multiple versions of two years' worth of federal budgets flying around, some details are still emerging about what's in and what's out. At the end of last week we heard that the FY2011 budget, which has been sent to the president for his signature, includes $100 million for the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. According to HUD Sustainable Communities Director Shelley Poticha, the partnership was allocated $70 million for regional planning grants ($17.5 million is slated for regions with populations of less than 500,000) and $30 million for Community Challenge planning grants.

Like everyone else, Safe Routes to School advocates are scaling back. Last year, a bill introduced in the Senate asked for $600 million to enhance pedestrian and bike safety near schools. “We were working in a pretty different environment,” said Margo Pedroso, deputy director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership. “Everybody was talking about a $500 billion transportation bill. So we figured, we don’t know what the full bill will be in the end, but let’s go for the funding we feel like we need.”

Just when we thought transportation had gotten off relatively easy in the shutdown-aversion budget deal:

It’s Monday morning, and the government is open for business. In a last-minute agreement just an hour before the current budget extension was to expire Friday night, Democrats and Republicans avoided the nuclear option of a government shutdown.

A powwow between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, President Obama, and House Speaker John Boehner last night failed to yield a compromise that would put a budget in place before the government shuts down at midnight tonight. The failure of yet another attempt to negotiate makes a government shutdown all but inevitable.

With the release of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal yesterday, right wing calls for massive cuts to transportation spending are now enshrined in the GOP leadership’s fiscal plan. Ryan singled out transportation as an area particularly ripe for cuts, criticized the use of gas tax revenues for projects that aren’t highways, and called for transportation spending levels to barely cover half of what President Obama requested in February.

Editor's note: These are the highlights from hearings on the upcoming transportation bill, where people made the case to Congress for sustainable transportation options. I'll follow up with the Bad and the Ugly (like a whole lineup of people who want to kick transit out of the Highway Trust Fund).