Secretary Anthony Foxx
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
National Council for Public-Private Partnerships P3 Connect Conference
Boston, MA – July 20, 2015
This is a very important time in the history of transportation in the U.S.
First, we find ourselves in a moment where the continued uncertainty at the federal level has paralyzed our transportation system. We know, for example, that there at least six states that are pulling projects back because of federal funding uncertainty, meaning that the planning and designing process into the projects has stalled. This trend is concerning. Because if we are to have a robust environment for public private partnerships in this country you still need to get those early stages of projects moved forward so that you have store of projects that investors can go to.
The second reason this is a very important moment for our transportation system is because at the very moment that revenues and uncertainty are high we have some tsunamis that are coming around the corner in transportation – starting with the fact that we’re going to continue growing as a country. In our recent Beyond Traffic report we found we’re going to have 70 million more people in our country over the next 30 years. Those people are going to want to move around like the rest of us. And if we are constrained by the current system and the current system isn’t maintained, obviously we’re going to have more congestion and more potholes, and we won’t be adding the capacity we need.
It’s not just private users. Our freight systems will be taxed as well. We are expecting 45 percent growth in freight volume over the next 30 years. This is occurring when we already know that truck congestion today is wasting $27 billion on fuel and lost productivity, or that it’s taking freight trains 30 hours just get through Chicago, which is the freight hub for the entire continent.
You have on top of that the widening of the new Panama Canal and the heavier loads that’ll bring to our ports, coupled with what we hope is a continued resurgence in manufacturing activity here in the U.S. and growth in U.S. exports.
So at a time when our revenues and our certainty are about as low, relatively speaking, as they’ve ever been, we know for sure that our country is growing and that we’re going to have more people accessing our roads, rails, and airports and more freight to move than ever before. This creates an environment where, rather than having a single strategy, we need to have an all-of-the-above strategy. And that is where the concept of public private partnerships plays in.
These have been happening in U.S. infrastructure for a while. And the questions we have facing us at the federal level are: What can we do to improve the environment for public private partnerships to happen in this country? How can we make them more accessible to our workers at the federal level, but also provide a little bit more support for state and local governments and folks in the private sector who might be a little uncertain about how they might go about it?
Enter President Obama about a year ago who made a pretty bold move, which is to charge the Department of Transportation to create something that is called the Build America Transportation Investment Center.
The President’s charge is to do several things at once.
First, to lay out best practices that can be utilized by both the public sector and the private sector, whether that is on legislation or on contracts.
Second, provide technical assistance. There are many projects in this country that are moving through some type of federal process via permitting or through the use of some other type of tool that we have available like the TIFIA loan program or Private Activity Bonds or the RRIF program. We want to help folks that are trying to utilize these tools to have the best chance of success.
And third, we are making sure that folks know about the tools that we do have available.
Our Transportation Investment Center turned a year old last week. And we do have some very tangible things to show for it. For instance, the center itself has supported $18 billion in infrastructure investment in just the past year. But we want to take some big leaps over the next year.
So let me just pause for a second and introduce all of you to someone who is going to help us do that. Andrew Right, our new leader of the center, is here today. His job will be to build out the team that will be working on the ground with folks to get critical projects moving. And you might hear from Andrew in the next couple weeks and months. We’ll be reaching out to stakeholders to hear directly from them how our center can be most useful to them. You’ll see us be a lot more aggressive in terms of outreach to states and the private sector. You’re going to see us be a lot more aggressive in terms of trying to drill down which projects to move forward.
So that is essentially it in a nutshell of what the Transportation Investment Center is up to. And I do want to say that this center is going to be much more effective if we have a long-term highway bill. It’s going to be much more effective if we have a long-term set of goals across the spectrum, including rail, including FAA, and others. These bills are coming up.
We know the highway bill will expire July 31st. The House has voted to extend again, and the hope is we can move a long-term bill by the end of the year. But you know, if we don’t have that long-term certainty, the work we are doing on public private partnerships is going to be very challenging.
So with that I’d like to stop here and make this more of a conversation. I look forward to your questions and comments. And I want to again thank the National Council for Public Private Partnerships for convening this conference. And I hope that next year we are able to say see more projects and billions of dollars being put to work, and that the Transportation Investment Center is seen by you as an integral part of how you get things done.
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