Infrastructure plan draws jeers
Bay Area officials call Trump’s proposal weak
President Trump’s long-offered promise to rebuild America’s roads, bridges and waterways led many local leaders to dream of a feast of needed funding.
But while the strategy laid out Monday by the White House — in which $200 billion would be offered by the federal government in a bid to spur $1.5 trillion in total investment over a decade — appeared to offer opportunity, it struck some Bay Area and California officials as too thin on aid and lacking critical details on how the money would be doled out.
They said the plan, which needs congressional approval, failed to support traditional federal
“It’s an incredible disappointment, woefully inadequate. It’s a pittance.” Randy Rentschler, Metropolitan Transportation Commission spokesman
programs designed to keep highways, transit systems, dams, airports and national parks running.
“It’s an incredible disappointment, woefully inadequate,” said Randy Rentschler, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Bay Area’s transportation planning and financing agency. “It’s a pittance.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco called the proposal “puny.”
Since his presidential campaign, Trump has promised a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, while leaving local leaders and the public to speculate on what that could mean. Monday’s plan offered some details — $200 billion in federal funds, spread over 10 years, with a preference for half of the money to go to states that passed tax increases, like a gas tax, in the past three years.
Combining state, local and private industry contributions with the federal money will get the effort to $1.5 trillion or more, the administration said. It proposed the removal of “regulatory barriers,” with permit processes “streamlined and shortened.”
The Bay Area Council, which advocates for the region’s business community, said it was encouraged that Trump was “making good on his promise to address this country’s badly deteriorating infrastructure.” The group applauded the idea of public-private partnerships and the potential for removing regulations — two aspects of the proposal that drew strong criticism from Democrats and environmentalists.
“There will be much debate about the balance of funding from various sources — federal, state, local and private — but we’re encouraged that the issue is attracting attention from the highest levels of leadership,” said Jim Wunderman, who heads the council.
The proposal gave little indication of how money could be split among infrastructure projects such as highways, public transportation, railroad, airports, ports, and drinking water and flood control systems.
Left unanswered is the potential impact on big Bay Area and state transportation and water projects, including high-speed rail and Gov. Jerry Brown’s tunnel plan to move Sacramento River water across the state. Major Bay Area transit projects hoping for federal help include the BART extension to downtown San Jose and Santa Clara and Caltrain’s extension to the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco.
“We’re certainly trying to find common ground with the administration on infrastructure funding,” High-Speed Rail Authority Chair Dan Richard said Monday. “They have indicated that they want to leverage federal support and award the states that have been self-help states. California has been very aggressive both at the state level and regional level, and that certainly is consistent with the direction of the (infrastructure) plan.”
Though high-speed-rail officials have secured considerable state and federal funding, the $64 billion project is well short of what it needs. The proposed rail line, which is beginning to be built across the Central Valley, eventually will carry 220-mph trains between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Asked if California might benefit because the state raised its gas tax and vehicles fees — and Bay Area counties in the BART district boosted property taxes — in the past three years, Rentschler said, “Almost certainly not . ... You don’t really know yet. But this program is not geared to help projects like BART to San Jose.”
He noted that the plan counts on privatization, including the selling off of federal assets like Washington’s Reagan National and Dulles International airports, while encouraging more toll roads and the commercialization of highway rest stops.
While there may be some merit to those strategies, Rentschler said, the plan’s biggest shortcoming is that it fails to guarantee funding for basic transportation projects to maintain the federal interstate highway system and maintain and extend transit systems.
“It ignores the core responsibility of our government, which is to maintain and improve the things people use every day,” he said.
Fully funding the Bay Area’s transportation needs would, over the next 22 years, cost at least $290 billion, according to Plan Bay Area 2040, a long-range transportation plan. That includes $254 billion to bring existing streets, highways, bridges and transit systems into good condition. Building the region’s top 10 transportation projects would add another $36 billion.
Michael Quigley, executive director of the California Alliance for Jobs, a labor and construction industry group that promotes infrastructure investment, pointed out that the state’s Republican congressional delegation is threatening the state’s chances for funding by supporting the repeal of the gas-tax increase.
“I would say that it’s fundamentally hypocritical,” he said.
Quigley also said he found the White House commitment to infrastructure investment underwhelming. “It’s disappointing,” he said.
Officials with BART and Caltrans said Monday they were studying the plan and trying to determine its effect on current and future projects.
Some of California’s national parks could see long-running maintenance problems, from bumpy roads to broken toilets, shored up under Trump’s proposal. However, funding for the fixes involves a controversial plan that first needs congressional approval — using royalties from expanded oil and gas drilling to pay down the massive maintenance backlog.
The proposal would create an $18 billion public-lands fund to cover the costs of new roads, bridges and visitor centers at the nation’s 417 park sites. The fund, managed by the Department of the Interior, would also pay for infrastructure at wildlife refuges and schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said Monday that America’s parks were being “loved to death,” citing the park service’s $11.6 billion tab for deferred maintenance.
At Yosemite alone, the backlog is more than half-a-billion dollars. Wastewater treatment plants at El Portal and Tuolumne Meadows are in desperate need of repair, as are several roads, restrooms and visitor facilities, park officials say.
The Interior Department projects 50 percent more leases on federal lands for fossil-fuel development and alternativeenergy products that would support the new reserve, a funding mechanism that environmentalists say is wrongheaded.
“Increased funding for parks must not come at the expense of other public lands and waters that would be irreversibly damaged,” said Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.