Biden plan could be state windfall
A Biden initiative expected to pour up to $3 trillion into repairing America’s decrepit infrastructure and funding other programs has sparked a scramble across the nation for the federal funds — with California expecting to reap the biggest piece.
The potential federal bounty opens the door to a list of ambitious projects: electrifying the Burbank-toAnaheim passenger rail system, straightening the Los Angeles-to-San Diego rail line to cut travel time, and building a 1.3-mile tunnel to extend a passenger line to downtown San Francisco.
The exact size of the infrastructure plan is still in flux, but sources knowledgeable about the discussion put it at up to $2 trillion, with another $1 trillion aimed at jobs, education and other goals, a set of proposals that Biden would receive from advisors this week. Whether such a massive package can get through Congress is uncertain at best.
Biden’s plan is meant to provide enough money to not just repair crumbling infrastructure, but transform transportation in America, said Rep. John Garamendi, a northern California Democrat
who is a senior member of the House Transportation
and Infrastructure
Committee.
Garamendi spent more than an hour with Biden in recent weeks and came away convinced that the program will be broad enough to improve most areas of the nation’s infrastructure: highways, passenger rail, electric grids, dams, sewers and water systems, ocean terminals and airports. “He said all of the above,” Garamendi said.
Amid the bounty of funding, the biggest transportation project in the nation, the $100-billion, high-speed rail project, will have to compete for funding with lesser-known proposals in California. Its construction problems, cost growth and delays have muddied its future.
“The demands for political support from other programs are significant,” Garamendi said. “The funding for high-speed rail must contend with the other programs. [It] will get funding, but it will not get funding that beggars the other projects.”
The last time the government launched such a large-scale effort was in the 1950s, with President Eisenhower’s initiative to build the interstate highway system.
By the time it was finished less than a decade later, 42,795 miles of paved super highway had been laid. It remains “the largest human-built thing in the world,” said Federal Highway Administration spokesman Doug Hecox.
Since then, infrastructure spending has been consistently pushed aside. Rusty bridges, faulty electrical grids, contaminated water supplies and potholed highways are fixtures across the landscape. Past presidents have failed to fix the problems, in part because those projects are
costly, largely invisible and don’t attract strident political support.
The United States each year pays in lives and dollars.
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey slammed Houston, killing 100 and causing $125 billion in damage after the storm overwhelmed floodcontrol systems. A suspect wire broke and triggered the 2018 Camp fire in Northern California, killing more than 80 people and causing $16.5 billion of damage. In 2007, an eightlane bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed, sending 13 people to their death.
A priority of the Biden plan is delivering benefits across social and racial lines, as well as broadly addressing climate change. Inadequate public works in poor communities have caused contaminated water, such as in Flint, Mich., and the Central Valley, and fixes there will likely be part of the Biden plan.
Plans for an all-electrical car fleet will require massive investments in power
generation and transmission, which is also part of the Biden plan. Climate change is causing sea levels to rise, while triggering more powerful storms, threatening coastal highways, rail lines and floodcontrol defenses.
Garamendi said the size of the infrastructure plan will be determined from a “bottoms-up” approach based on what is needed around the nation. At least part of it will be paid with new fees or taxes, such as a new tax on vehicles based on how many miles are driven, or a tax on the assets of the wealthy.
The speculation that the project will come in at $2 trillion apparently started with the American Society of Civil Engineers, which recently released a report card on American infrastructure that found public works improvements and repairs to raise standards to an acceptable level would cost $2.6 trillion over the next decade. About half of the faulty infrastructure is in transportation, which the association gave a grade
of D.
“We are facing challenging environmental problems, social equity issues and increased severity of national disasters,” said Tom Smith, the association’s executive director. “The time is right for an infrastructure program that could unite and inspire the country.”
C. David Turner, a retired Army Corps of Engineers brigadier general and senior associate at the environmental consulting firm Dawson & Associates, said: “Potentially, every sector gets something out of this.”
“I see something in the range of $1.7 trillion to $2.3 trillion in the program,” he said, adding that that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — which handles water, flood-control and navigation — has a $40-billion backlog of projects alone.
The scramble is on among California agencies to get a piece. A confidential report known as a “white paper” circulating among transit agencies, which The Times obtained, provides an extensive list of local transportation projects across the state that could compete with the bullet train for funding.
The California bullet train has pushed for a big piece of the money. Brian Kelly, chief executive of the California High Speed Rail Authority, wasted little time in making his pitch last November, shortly after the election.
Supporters suggested the Biden administration provide $40 billion for the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train, enough theoretically to bore tunnels through three mountain chains that separate the state, but the proposal went nowhere, according to individuals with knowledge of the talks. Kelly said through a spokeswoman that he did not make such a proposal.
Indeed, the bullet train faces a tough fight even securing a legislative appropriation of $4.1 billion in its own bond funds it is seeking this year for its Central Valley construction plan. The California Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution last year that would block some of the planned spending in the Central Valley as a prelude to shifting money to Bay Area and Southern California segments of the project.
Support in the House transportation committee is uncertain. Committee Democrats Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, and Marc DeSaulnier, D-Concord, both cast votes as California senators against appropriating money to the bullet train in 2012, against the wishes of former Gov. Jerry Brown. Republican Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, is a longtime critic. Newly elected Republican Michelle Steel from Orange County recently introduced legislation that would block any new federal funding for the project.