Mica (R-Fla.) on Wednesday told a gathering of transportation experts that House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) cited “the constraints of time” in the run-up to Christmas in asking him to delay the bill.
“I could have dropped it Friday,” Mica said, referring to formally introducing a bill that has yet to be publicly presented in written form.
Though he said the primary reason for the delay was the press of other House business, Mica said Wednesday that finding the means to pay for the bill remained an issue. He won a concession from Boehner and Cantor this summer that allowed him to craft a bill with more spending than current House rules permit.
That required, however, finding new funding. Boehner later proposed opening new offshore and Arctic areas to oil exploration, and taxing output from those new wells to fund the bill. His plan was not well received by many Democrats and environmentalists.
Mica described the drilling proposal as a “Band-Aid” that would cover short-term funding gaps in the new bill until a more concrete solution can be found. Though public and congressional sentiment are strongly against imposing a fee-per-mile tolling system, most transportation experts acknowledge that with revenue from the federal gas tax dwindling, the vehicle-miles-traveled tax, as it is known, is best option.
Mica on Wednesday reiterated his belief that there is a lucrative middle ground by keeping existing interstate highway lanes toll-free but encouraging public-private partnerships to develop lucrative high-occupancy toll lanes like those being built on the Capital Beltway in Virginia.
On the Senate side, Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Committee on Environment and Public Works displayed a rare moment of bipartisan good cheer last month in a unanimous vote to send a two-year transportation bill
to the floor. The bill would provide almost $80 billion for surface transportation, but it arrived on the floor with the promise to fill a $29 billion gap between the revenue stream that pays for transportation — the Highway Trust Fund — and what Boxer (D-Calif.) wants to spend.
Mica, in informal remarks to transportation experts gathered by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, dismissed the two-year bill as inadequate to meet the needs of state planners for longer-term funding stability. He said he expected the House bill will cover five or six years.
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