SierraScape October - November 2003
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Legislation could erase decades of progress ... or build on successes

By Eric Olson and Neha Bhatt, Sierra Club Challenge to Sprawl Campaign, www.sierraclub.org/sprawl

In the coming months, Congress will pass a mammoth transportation bill which could either continue moving transportation priorities in the direction of smart growth, or take us backward toward a narrow focus on road-building and promoting more sprawl. We are especially concerned that environmental reviews and public involvement processes that help protect communities may be dramatically weakened.

TEA-3, as the federal transportation bill is now termed, will guide spending over the next 6 years to the tune of $250 - $375 billion. The last transportation bill, passed in 1998, was $217 billion. Because the funding authorization runs out on September 30, 2003, Congressional committees worked this summer to draft a new bill. However, some in Congress want to use TEA-3 to undo many of the gains made during the last decade.

Because the wrong transportation choices can result in dangerous impacts on air and water quality, public health, our natural and historical heritage and quality of life, it is critical to make our priorities known to Congress.

Top priorities for TEA-3:

No "gutting" of the environmental and public review processes, which offer protections for communities, parks, wetlands, wildlife refuges, historic sites, and more. The Bush administration and some Congressional leaders have proposed damaging proposals that would gut the environmental review provisions outlined in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and remove the protections on parklands, historical sites, wildlife refuges and other environmentally sensitive areas.

• NEPA is a landmark environmental law, passed with broad bipartisan support 30 years ago and signed into law by President Nixon. Now, President Bush and some members of Congress want to impose unrealistic deadlines on conducting environmental reviews of transportation projects; severely limit timeframes for citizens to challenge bad aspects of projects in court; and transfer more power over environmental reviews to state and local departments of transportation. These changes would weaken those reviews and the public input process. Within TEA-3, we must preserve the protections offered by NEPA.
• The Bush Administration would also transfer the power to evaluate transportation project impacts on historic sites, parklands and recreation areas from resource managers - whose focus is on environmental preservation - to the U.S. Department of Transportation. This move would drastically weaken the protections on our nation's most important sites from irreversible impacts.

Don't weaken clean air protections. As asthma rates and respiratory ailments continue to rise around the country, and the health threats of bad air, especially for children and seniors, grow annually, we cannot allow any deterioration of our clean air protections.

• In an attempt to ignore the long-term effects of transportation projects on air quality (and to circumvent impediments to new road construction), some in Congress would require that air pollution consequences of new roads be projected for only 10 years. This is half of the 20 year projections that are now required. Cutting back these projections would ignore important data and will only lead to dirtier air in the long run.
• Other attacks on clean air include lengthening the time between air quality check-ups from every three years to every five years. It is important to balance the air pollution budget frequently enough to catch problems before they become serious, just as people should balance their checkbooks regularly. We must resist attempts to lengthen intervals between air quality check-ups.
• In order to clean up the nation's air, Congress should increase funding for transportation that improves air quality. The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality improvement program (CMAQ) provides funding for clean transportation projects in regions with unhealthy air. CMAQ provides essential emergency funds to help areas with the worst air pollution implement measures such as clean buses, transit, and pedestrian and bike infrastructure so they can meet acceptable air quality standards while also solving transportation needs. The number of regions with unhealthy air will more than double in the next few years; thus the CMAQ program should be at least doubled to meet the growing need.

Protect and Grow the Transit Program. In order to build upon the gains in mass transit over the last decade and promote alternatives to sprawl, we must insist on the following:

• Oppose a crippling proposal by Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA), which would raid the transit fund in order to bolster the highway fund. The Baucus-Grassley proposal would push responsibility to come up with the missing funding onto states and localities through a bonding mechanism, which would prove risky and would destabilize the program putting transit further out of the reach for our communities.
• Maintain a level playing field between the transit and highway programs. Currently, states and localities must pay for 20 percent of new transit and highway projects, while the federal government pays 80 percent. Due to high competition for transit projects, communities often will pay a higher percentage to get a transit project. The Bush Administration wants to require states to come up with 50% of the cost for new transit, setting a prohibitive threshold to get new projects started for the least affluent communities who would need it the most. At the same time, however, the Bush proposal maintains an 80-20 federal-state split for road projects. Effectively, communities that are trying to solve transportation needs would be encouraged to build roads not transit. This would be a devastating change in policy that would only create more sprawl and greater air pollution.
• In order to meet the growing demand for transit in metro, suburban and rural communities around the country, Congress should grow the transit program. The current 4:1 highway/transit funding ration should be changed to 3:1. For every $3 spent on highways, transit should receive at least $1. Increasing transit's slice of the transportation budget will move our transportation priorities in the right direction to clean up our air, increase our transportation choices, and revitalize businesses in our towns and cities.

Because the transportation bill is only authorized every six years, it is a massive piece of legislation with only a narrow window of opportunity for us to influence the outcome. Once this bill passes, the next opportunity to influence federal transportation priorities will be 2009.

Please contact your Senators and Representative and ask them to prioritize public transit, public health, and the environment, and to let them know that TEA-3 should not be used to weaken public involvement in transportation planning or the environmental review processes. The victims of a bad TEA-3 bill will be our air and water, the health of our children and seniors, those individuals without access to cars, and those with respiratory ailments.

Contact information for your congressional delegation may be found at: www.congress.org

For more information about TEA-3, please visit: www.sierraclub.org/sprawl