Chamber Joins Unusual Allies Against Mica’s Highway Bill

By Kathryn A. Wolfe, CQ Staff

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spends a lot of time and money backing Republicans politically and in the halls of Congress, and is normally especially in tune with the GOP on fiscal and economic issues.

So, it is quite unusual to have a major piece of Republican legislation criticized by a Chamber official before it has even been introduced. It’s even more out of the ordinary when the giant business organization says it prefers a liberal Democratic lawmaker’s alternative.

But that was the reception House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman John L. Mica, R-Fla., got Thursday when he sketched out his plan to cut federal highway funding.

Janet Kavinoky, the Chamber’s executive director of transportation and infrastructure, termed as “unacceptable” the funding level in Mica’s draft surface transportation bill, which would hold spending to about $230 billion over six years — the amount that can be supported by the Highway Trust Fund and a considerable reduction from the $286.5 billion provided by the 2005 highway law (PL 109-59).

Although the Chamber official praised Mica’s proposals to streamline the process for approving transportation projects, she said cutting back federal spending “will destroy — rather than support — existing jobs and will not enable creation of the additional jobs needed to put the 16.3 percent of unemployed workers in the construction industry back to work.”

Most transportation stakeholder groups, including road builders and other contractors, took an approach similar to the Chamber, praising Mica’s bill for its provisions intended to speed up construction projects and reduce the duration of environmental reviews, but criticizing the chairman’s funding levels.

Kavinoky noted that “an alternative exists” — a two-year, $109 billion surface transportation bill championed by Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Boxer’s bill would basically maintain current levels of spending, plus inflation.

The Chamber has seldom found itself agreeing with Boxer on legislative issues. In fact, in its scoring of lawmakers’ votes during the 111th Congress, the Chamber said the senator voted in agreement with its positions only 18 percent of the time. Mica’s grade from the Chamber was 88 percent.

But the chamber also finds itself aligned with another usual nemesis — organized labor — on the merits of Mica’s surface transportation bill, although labor interests were a little more colorful and less restrained in their reactions to the proposal.

Ed Wytkind, president of the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, described Mica’s draft as “the worst highway and transit funding bill in modern history” and a “loser for the American economy.”