The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Infrastructure plan meets some applause
But others calling Trump’s $1.5 trillion proposal a ‘con job.’
WASHINGTON — Panned as a toll-road nightmare, a plot to pave wetlands and worse, President Donald Trump’s proposal for $1.5 trillion in new infrastructure spending has also met some applause. In San Francisco.
“He’s really the first person from his party to name a number and say we’re going to shoot for that number,” said Jim Wunderman, president and chief executive of the Bay Area Council, a business-backed public policy group. “It’s different to have a Republican president say ‘We’re going to spend money on infrastructure’ and mean it.”
The proposal Trump announced in his State of the Union address last week was directed at fulfilling a major campaign promise, but came without details. He set the goal at $1.5 trillion, and called on Congress to deliver legislation that meets that number by leveraging state and local money and “where appropriate” tapping private funds. A written summary of the president’s plan included just $200 billion in federal money over 10 years.
Trump also wants to shave the permit process for new infrastructure projects to two years or less.
“We will build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways and waterways across our land,” Trump said.
Democrats in Congress are already lining up against the proposal’s funding scheme.
Even Republicans say the plan needs more money, but they add that the presidential push could help unblock decades of bipartisan neglect of roads, bridges, water systems, airports, transit systems and other public facilities.
“I can appreciate that the president is a big thinker,” said Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., one of the nine Californians on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “We obviously have a lot more work to do to find the revenue ... but I think it’s got legs and we are moving forward.”
Details of the administration’s thinking came out last week in a leaked summary that sent critics to the barricades.
The plan would override bedrock environmental laws, critics said, while the offer of $200 billion over 10 years in federal money is a far cry from Trump’s $1.5 trillion promise. The difference would ostensibly be made up by leveraging private funds at extravagant rates that critics said are at best unrealistic and at worst could amount to selling off public assets.
The plan would also shift
much of the financial burden to state and local governments.
Even Denham said Congress will need to “at least double” the $200 billion Trump proposed.
Democratic Rep. Mark DeSaulnier of Concord in Northern California, who sits on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee with Denham, called Trump’s plan a “con job.”
“A kind way would be to describe it as unrealistic and unfeasible, and a more direct way would be to say it’s a con job,” said DeSaulnier, who worked on infrastructure issues for years in the state Legislature before entering Congress in 2015.
DeSaulnier said Trump’s plan relies on “voodoo financing” that “doesn’t begin to address the $1.5 trillion we need,” while trying to “privatize as much of infrastructure as possible.”
Another committee member, Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., said the administration’s proposals to cut mass transit and other existing infrastructure to offset the cost of infrastructure improvements turns the whole thing into a wash.