Barack Obama

Senators get $240 million for bridge

Friday, July 29, 2005

BELLVILLE NEWS-DEMOCRAT

Officials rethinking new bridge design

U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Belleville, announced Thursday night that Congress would authorize $240 million for a new Mississippi River bridge.

Costello said in a news release he secured $150 million for the bridge as part of a national transportation bill. He said Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama secured the other $90 million.

"This was a great effort by the bi-state delegation to secure a significant amount of money for the new bridge," said Costello, who is a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Lawmakers originally sought $350 million over six years for the project.

The funding is included in a section of the transportation bill for regional or "mega" projects, according to Costello's statement.

Congress moved to vote on a $286.4 billion highway and mass transit bill that would send lawmakers home for their summer vacations bearing big gifts of roads, bridges and jobs throughout the country.

The House was to vote first on the 1,000-page package, although a last-minute dispute between committee chairmen over spending authority had lawmakers waiting in their offices late Thursday. A post-midnight vote on the six-year measure would be the House's last major act before recessing for the six-week summer break. The Senate was to follow suit today.

With the president's expected signature, passage of the act would end an almost two-year impasse in which Congress and the White House battled over the proper spending levels and states were at odds over how best to divide up the billions in federal highway money.

On Monday, regional transportation officials said they are rethinking their $1.6 billion design for a new Mississippi River bridge, citing concerns about just how much the federal government is willing to lay out for it.

The Illinois and Missouri transportation officials announced they had hired a consultant firm to try and scale back the original design to cut costs and speed up the construction schedule. It was a move Costello supported.

"It needs to be scaled back anyway," Costello said. "I've been telling (the Illinois Department of Transportation) that for months."

The study will cost $2.5 million and is expected to be complete early next year.

Costello said the national transportation bill under consideration Thursday would increase total highway funding in Illinois $309.15 million a year, or 33.4 percent per year over the current level of funding.

"It's time to put people to work at improving our roads and our bridges and our public transportation so that Illinois can still be the crossroads of a 21st century America," Obama said in a written statement.

The last six-year transportation bill expired in September 2003.

The current bill would direct federal funds to thousands of projects requested by members, from $200 million for a bridge in Alaska named for the chairman of the House Transportation Committee to $2 million to pave roads on a South Dakota Indian reservation.

The bill also designates hundreds of new bus terminals, railways, bike trails, pedestrian walkways and parking lots. Mass transit receives more than 18 percent of the money, more than $50 billion, while $6 billion is set aside for transportation safety programs.

The nation has been without a new act since September 2003, when the 1998-2003 law, funded at $218 billion, expired. Since then, Congress has had to pass 11 temporary extensions to keep money flowing to the states for construction projects.

That delay has disrupted schedules for new projects and prevented the hiring of tens of thousands of construction workers.