Secretary Anthony Foxx

TIGER Three County Road Improvements Project Visit
Clairborne County, MS • September 13, 2014

Remarks as prepared for delivery

Thanks everybody!

Every day in America, almost every one of our 300 million people use our transportation system. A lot goes into making that possible behind the scenes – maintenance, financing, permitting. But for most people, they simply think about transportation as a matter of getting from point A to point B.

Maybe that oversimplifies things.  But – really – if we do our jobs correctly, transportation shouldn’t be much more complicated than that.

If you drive an 80,000-pound log truck for a living, you shouldn’t have to worry about bridges rated “deficient.”

If driving is your only way to get work, you shouldn’t have to set aside part of paychecks for extra car repairs because the roads are crumbling … or for extra fuel because a road is closed and you have to take a long detour.

No one should have to be concerned about these things.  But in this three-county region, it is a daily concern for EVERYONE.

To get anywhere – to run errands, to get to school, to get to employers like Grand Gulf Nuclear – you drive.  There’s no other option.

There’s no alternative to your roads… roads that are in need of repair, and that aren’t well connected, and that flood easily.  And sixty bridges that are rated “deficient.”

Well, to people experiencing this, I come bearing good news: Yesterday, DOT announced its TIGER grants for 2014… nearly $600 million dollars that we’re awarding to 72 transportation projects in 46 states and Washington, DC.  And about a quarter of them are in rural areas.

This is a program we’ve had for six years. But in this round of TIGER, I asked for something a bit different. I told communities that I wanted to see projects that have a demonstrable impact on making peoples’ lives easier… on connecting folks to middle class jobs and bigger opportunities.

Clairborne, Franklin, and Jefferson counties worked together to come back with a project that did exactly that: The Three County Road Improvements Project.

Now, it’s not news around here that local governments are struggling to find the money to pay for critical road and bridge repairs.

You wrote to us when you submitted your TIGER application that funding constraints are allowing, quote, “existing roads and bridges to deteriorate faster than the county governments can raise and save money to repair them.”

You even included a picture of someone from the country road department do something that’s become routine: changing the posting at a bridge to reflect a downgraded weight limit.

I hear that, when it comes to some bridges, school buses can’t even drive over them anymore.

So here’s what we’re going to do: Today, DOT will award a $17.8 million TIGER grant so you can tackle – as you put it – a “blitz” of projects that will modernize 41 miles of roads and 18 bridges described as substandard.

And you are going to do more than repair infrastructure.

The estimate is that you will create more than 200 jobs with this project.  And this region– let me quote your application one more time – will “move toward a level of parity with the more developed areas.”

So I’ll end my remarks there except to say this: I’m very excited about what’s happening here in Mississippi; but it’s also a reminder of how much more work we have to do.

Because for every project like this, there are so many more worthy projects that aren’t being rebuilt in this round of TIGER. This year, for every dollar in TIGER projects we funded, there are 15 dollars in projects we didn’t.  (Our TIGER program’s acceptance rate was as low as West Point’s).

And what that tells us is: The need for infrastructure investment is great in this country. And TIGER alone cannot meet it.

For years, we’ve been funding transportation with bills that are too short-term – and are also short of the funds we need.

And so, the Obama Administration has put forward the GROW AMERICA Act – a four-year, $302-billion dollar proposal.

So you can expect me to work to make funding projects like this one not the exception, but the rule.

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