U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee protects transit investments in Washington

Bil­lions of dol­lars in sore­ly need­ed fund­ing for mass tran­sit and infra­struc­ture projects in Wash­ing­ton State will be includ­ed in the Fis­cal Year 2018 Trans­porta­tion, Hous­ing and Urban Devel­op­ment Appro­pri­a­tions bill now mov­ing to the full Unit­ed States Sen­ate, Pat­ty Mur­ray’s office announced today.

“Today, a bipar­ti­san group of sen­a­tors came togeth­er to reject [Don­ald] Trump’s short-sight­ed cuts to the kinds of invest­ments that make a real dif­fer­ence to fam­i­lies and work­ers in Wash­ing­ton state and around the coun­try,” Sen­a­tor Mur­ray said in a press release. “Whether it’s infra­struc­ture invest­ment, afford­able hous­ing, edu­ca­tion, or med­ical research, I will keep fight­ing to make sure the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to be a good part­ner to the com­mu­ni­ties we represent.”

Cour­tesy of Mur­ray’s office, here’s a run­down of some of the vital projects that were pro­tect­ed in the ver­sion of the bill approved by the Appro­pri­a­tions Committee:

• Cap­i­tal Invest­ment Grant Pro­gram: $2.1 bil­lion, reject­ing Pres­i­dent Trump’s pro­pos­al to block new tran­sit projects from receiv­ing fund­ing, and instead sup­port­ing three tran­sit projects in Puget Sound, includ­ing Sound Transit’s Lyn­nwood Link Exten­sion and Seat­tle Depart­ment of Transportation’s Cen­ter City Con­nec­tor Street­car and Madi­son Street Bus Rapid Transit.
• Amtrak: $1.2 bil­lion to sup­port long-dis­tance routes, includ­ing the Coast Starlight and Empire Builder that run through Wash­ing­ton, which Don­ald Trump sought to terminate.
• Crude-by-rail Safe­ty Ini­tia­tives:
  • $15.9 mil­lion for the Auto­mat­ed Track Inspec­tion Pro­gram, Rail­road Safe­ty Infor­ma­tion Sys­tem, and research and development,
  • $2 mil­lion for the Short Line Safe­ty Insti­tute for safe­ty train­ing for short line rail­roads trans­port­ing crude oil and ethanol, a pro­gram Sen. Mur­ray helped cre­ate in 2014 and which sup­ports short line rail­roads in Washington,
  • $2 mil­lion for tank car research activ­i­ties, and
  • Directs the U.S. Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion to com­plete a rule­mak­ing to expand com­pre­hen­sive oil spill response plan require­ments to rail car­ri­ers no lat­er than 5 days after enact­ment of this bill to bet­ter pro­tect the safe­ty of our com­mu­ni­ties and environment.

There’s also $550 mil­lion to con­tin­ue the TIGER pro­gram (Trans­porta­tion Invest­ment Gen­er­at­ing Eco­nom­ic Recov­ery) which has come to the res­cue of more than a dozen high pro­file trans­porta­tion infra­struc­ture projects in Wash­ing­ton State, like the South Park bridge replace­ment effort.

It is a huge relief to hear that Sen­a­tor Mur­ray was able to secure fund­ing for Sound Tran­sit’s Lyn­nwood Link expan­sion, the Cen­tral City Con­nec­tor Street­car, and Amtrak long dis­tance routes. The oth­er appro­pri­a­tions are cer­tain­ly wins too, but our region was real­ly going to suf­fer if fund­ing for train ser­vice was pulled.

The Trump regime’s attempts to gut fund­ing for tran­sit fly in the face of Don­ald’s rhetoric dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, when he talked about (and cam­paigned on) putting mon­ey into infra­struc­ture. Amer­i­ca has a mas­sive infra­struc­ture deficit, which would be bad­ly exac­er­bat­ed by the regime’s desired bud­get cuts.

Thank­ful­ly, we have sen­a­tors like Pat­ty Mur­ray who are stand­ing up to the regime and fight­ing for the invest­ments that we need.

As Trump does­n’t have line item veto pow­er, he will either have to accept or reject the Fis­cal Year 2018 Trans­porta­tion, Hous­ing and Urban Devel­op­ment Appro­pri­a­tions bill when it gets to him. He won’t be able to mark it up himself.