Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, Mr. Garamendi, for our shared commitment to American manufacturing and to ensure that, once again, America will be the envy of the world for a fantastic infrastructure and transportation system. Mr.…
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, Mr. Garamendi, for our shared commitment to American manufacturing and to ensure that, once again, America will be the envy of the world for a fantastic infrastructure and transportation system.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne), who is my friend and colleague, to continue our discussion on this the second day of National Infrastructure Week to talk about the tremendous need that we have in this country to do a better job to ensure our citizens get to work on time and safely and get home in the same way.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in recognition of National Infrastructure Week. I do this proudly as the daughter and
granddaughter of civil engineers--men who built bridges, roads, airports, and dams all across this country and all across the world. However, Mr. Speaker, sadly, today I need to recognize that America is not getting a good grade in infrastructure. In fact, just this last month, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave America's infrastructure a grade of D-plus.
Now, before we despair, we can be happy it is not as bad as 4 years ago when it was a D. But there is no parent in America who will cheer when their child comes home and says: I made it all the way from a D to a D-plus.
America can and must do better, and this Congress needs to fulfill its duty under the Constitution and under the basic tenets of what a government is supposed to do by meeting the needs of the American people. There is no better time than now, and there is no better place than here, in the people's House, for us to take up this call because, at the end of the day, infrastructure is about jobs. It is about putting people to work right now replacing those bridges, roads, dams, airports, and rails. But, more importantly, it is about getting people to work safely and on time tomorrow and getting home in time to see the soccer game.
So we are going to go through, a little bit, some of what these grades were. So the composite grade of D-plus is made up of roads, D; and bridges, C-plus. Many Americans will remember an August night 10 years ago in 2007, in the Twin Cities. People were driving across a heavily traveled bridge on I-35. The bridge collapsed, sending people crashing down into the river. Twenty Americans lost their lives when that bridge collapsed.
In my own State of Connecticut, people remember when the Mianus River Bridge collapsed on I-95, the major backbone of the entire Northeast corridor. Fortunately, the bridge collapsed in the middle of the night, and only three people died. Had it been during the middle of the day, that number would have been far higher.
Mr. Speaker, America should not wait, nor should this Congress wait, until bridges collapse or trains derail until we fix our aging infrastructure. It is the backbone of what government is supposed to do.
Our roads are congested. In 2014, engineers estimated that congestion cost American commuters $160 billion in a single year. For the average commuter in an urban area, that was 42 hours of their lives--a full workweek. So it is not just dollars and aggravation, it is polluted air, and it is broken axles. But it is also time, which for many Americans is the most valuable thing we have. We want to see our families. We work hard in this country, and we in Congress should be working harder to make sure that our hardworking people we represent can get home on time to see their families.
So that is where we are. That is where we are with bridges and roads. I had a constituent come up to me in the nearby city of Waterbury last week. We were looking at an aging infrastructure intersection. She said:
I came over here just to tell you that I hit such a big
pothole last week. I have got a couple-hundred-dollar repair
bill for my car, and I don't have the money to pay for it.
You have got to tell those people in Washington we need to
fix things so I don't have to worry about a pothole ruining
my car and making me unable to pay my bills.
Mr. Speaker, too many of our bridges are structurally deficient-- almost 4 in 10 of our bridges. Thirty-nine percent are 50 years old or older. That is the structural lifespan of a bridge--50 years. I drive across some of those every single day, and nearly 10 percent of the Nation's bridges are graded structurally deficient. Just to say, they are really not safe.
It is not just bridges and roads that are in dire need of repairs. We also have our rail system. We saw from my colleague, Mr. Payne, that rail systems are a problem. Our transit systems are in desperate need of upgrade. Passenger rail, we don't even have a full estimate of what that would take to bring it up to speed. We have passenger rail that runs through Connecticut; 100,000 people commute every single day. The commute right now from New Haven, Connecticut, to New York City is as long as it was 100 years ago. Surely America can do better. It is not just passenger rail and freight rail.
We should say a good word about freight rail here. Freight rail is the reason we are up from a D-plus to a D. Freight has moved up to a B, so we can be glad about freight's grade this past year.
We also have airports. Now, I don't know how many of you have been through airports recently. If you have, you might even be surprised they are up to a D and not lower than that. American airports are congested. Many of them are aging and are in need of significant work. Congestion at airports is growing. Twenty-four of the top 30 airports in the U.S. are experiencing the ``Thanksgiving-peak traffic volume'' once a week. That used to be a term that was used once a year. American airports across the country are serving 2 million passengers a year.
I can tell you about a recent time I landed in LaGuardia Airport in New York. It used to be considered one of the Nation's shining examples. People came and arrived in LaGuardia and were amazed and impressed with this great country.
One of the last times I was in LaGuardia Airport, I was greeted by a blue plastic tarp duct-taped to the ceiling inside the terminal, funneled down into a 30-gallon trash can to collect the water that was leaking through the terminal. That is not the way a great country greets its own citizens, or any others, to one of the world's great cities.
In addition to the work we need to do on our airports, we have our water infrastructure. This is our clean water system, and it is also our wastewater system. According to the most recent Clean Watersheds Needs Survey, the EPA reports that the total wastewater and storm water treatment capital needs in the next 25 years is $271 billion; yet the Federal Government has been contributing less and less to that growing need to make sure that our rivers and streams and waterways are clean.
All of America saw, last year, what happened when one single community, Flint, Michigan, failed to add a single corrosion-prevention agent to its clean water and ended up literally poisoning its children with lead.
It is time for America to do better. There are costs when we don't invest in this country. I like to think of it more or less like the roof on America's house.
Now, many of you may know it is pretty exciting when you put an addition on your house, but it is not exciting to replace your roof; but if you don't replace your roof and it keeps leaking, ultimately, you lose the entire house. The ceiling collapses. That is where we are as a country right now. We have stopped fixing America's roof. We have stopped it in bridges and roads. We have stopped in it airports and rail. It is time for us to get going.
I will tell you that I am encouraged by reports coming from the new administration about making a serious commitment to invest in America's infrastructure, but there are some things that we need to keep in mind when we are talking about American infrastructure. One is to remember that it used to be called by another name. It used to be called public works.
There is a reason it was public works. There is a reason it wasn't private works. So I think it is certainly appropriate that we look to do public-private partnerships, to leverage the power of private investors to fix some of our aging infrastructure, and to build some new infrastructure.
But we should make no mistake: This country became great, it was transformed by the Interstate Highway System, literally linking America from end to end. But we cannot expect, nor should we think, that the basic public infrastructure of America is going to be able to be outsourced to financiers in New York City. If that were the case, they would have already done it. These are basic public works where we need real dollar investments, and I can assure the administration there are many of us in Congress who are ready to move forward with that.
When we are talking about infrastructure, there is another piece I like to remind people we need, because part of infrastructure is moving goods and services, getting people to work and back, getting things to markets and things they want to buy and put on the table. But the 21st century is going to be built on information, and information is what is moving most in this society and creating much of the value.
So if we need information, that means we need energy and we need internet everywhere. So in addition to infrastructure and transportation, we need to have infostructure. We need to have reliable, cybersecure, sustainable energy systems across America, and we need to have internet available for every single American to participate in this exciting new economy. So we have infrastructure, we have infostructure, and we have public works.
Mr. Speaker, the roof of America's house is leaking. The time is now for this body, the people's House, to come together to work on real transportation and infrastructure bills. We have dozens of them that are available in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and other committees.
But the time has passed; the time has passed for us to wait, to pass the buck, to delay fixing the roof because the leaks are getting worse. The American people are suffering. When it is your family that is on the bridge that is structurally deficient, you would want, if your family crosses that bridge every day, you would want to make sure that it gets fixed and not wait until it falls down.
This is the sort of basic function government used to do without a question. It is what used to happen in this Chamber because people didn't care whether there was a D or an R after their name. Bridges and roads don't have D's or R's after their names. They are not affiliated with political parties, nor should they be. It is time for us to do our jobs and set aside whatever partisan bickering there may be in other venues.
On this, on bridges and roads, rail systems and dams, water infrastructure and infostructure, I ask my colleagues to please join me--join all of us--and make this, National Infrastructure Week, the start of the 115th Congress' commitment to do right by the American people, to make these investments, to do the sort of compromise and negotiation that this body is supposed to be doing to meet the needs of the American people.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.