Dive Brief:
- If Congress gets its act together and settles on a fix for Highway Trust Fund insolvency (the House has passed a bill; the next move is the Senate's), it will only push the insolvency problem down the road for 10 months, and it's worth hearing what three state agencies say running dry would mean to them.
- In Tennessee, Transportation Commissioner John Schroer said his state would begin to get paid only 70% of what it was submitting for federal reimbursement because the trust fund would be running only on what it gets from fuel tax.
- Mississippi transportation Executive Director Melinda McGrath said her state would pull all state-funded projects for which bids were sought this month, and Alabama said no new projects would be begin for a year.
Dive Insight:
The federal government became the backer of a lot of state construction work without doing anything to improve the structural support of the trust fund – fuel taxes set in 1995. Congress has been supplementing the fund with money from the government's general fund, but tightening federal budgets have brought the problem to a head.