A three-month funding extension is not in the bag. In fact, it has not even made it past the cashier.
For weeks the House Ways & Means and the Senate Finance Committee has been bending their brains trying to figure out a way to pass House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar’s (D-Minn.) six-year, $500 billion bill.
Oberstar, however, continues to hold out hope, and the House recently passed his three-month extension of the current highway bill, SAFETEA-LU. Oberstar is hoping to pull Congressional leaders together in an effort to convince enough to pass a long-term solution by the end of the year.
However, the Senate still would rather pass an 18-month funding extension, and now the talks around Capitol Hill is that SAFETEA-LU would receive enough funds to live one more month before a more permanent solution is reached. The decision on a 30-day extension could be made as early as next week.
“The difficult decisions that we face today will not be any easier 18 months from now,” Oberstar said on the House floor yesterday, “and the American people will pay the price for our inaction through lost jobs, decreased mobility, diminished productivity, and continued high levels of traffic fatalities and injuries.”
According to Streetsblog Capitol Hill, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) accused Oberstar of trying to buy time to bring the parties together to agree on a gas-tax increase. House Republicans were split on the three-month extension.
