Highway Trust Fund

Congressman Paul Tonko
Congressional Record: 114th Congress
July 13, 2015

[Page: H5108]

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(Mr. TONKO asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. TONKO. Mr. Speaker, we are closing in on yet another deadline and yet another needlessly manufactured crisis at the end of this month: the reauthorization of the highway trust fund.

Two months ago this body passed a short-term extension of the highway trust fund at the very last minute, as is standard procedure nowadays here in the House, temporarily protecting 660,000 jobs and extending 6,000 critical construction projects.

Republican House leadership has had more than a year to craft a bill that would repair our crumbling infrastructure, provide certainty to States, and protect hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs hanging in the balance.

Enough of this brinkmanship. Enough of this manufactured crisis. Enough of the short-term patches that waste time and money on problems that we create for ourselves.

It is time to pass a commonsense, ambitious, and long-term extension of the highway trust fund that rebuilds, renews, and puts America to work.

We just heard memorialized on this floor the former chair, the late Jim Oberstar, who headed the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He knew this was a sound investment in America. Let's go forward with that.