This is where states want to spend billions in financing infrastructure

Sacramento – On the highway over the Teton Pass in Wyoming, avalanches have been threatening motorists since the 1960s. In Washington and Oregon, drivers live with the daily awareness that in the event of a major earthquake, the bridge between Vancouver and Portland will likely collapse. In California, residents are at the mercy of out-of-control wildfires and massive droughts — and their costs into the stratosphere.

America’s to-do list has been growing for years, ever since President Biden and a bipartisan committee in Congress this year agreed to a historic modernization of the country’s aging infrastructure. On Friday, the measure — which had been on hold for several months amid negotiations over about $2 trillion in other spending — was finally passed.

“This is a game changer,” said Mark Polonkars, county executive director for Erie County, New York. “Off the bat, I have approximately $150 million in capital projects that we can move, from introducing our sewage treatment system into the 20th century to smaller bridges, some of which are 100 years old.”

Mark Wittenbeck, a treasurer of the Wisconsin Railroad Commuter Union and a retiree from a suburb of Milwaukee, celebrated the potential expansion of rail service: “While we did nothing, the Chinese were building 20,000 miles of high-speed rail.”

“President Biden understands the critical need to build a climate-resilient future,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. The new funding, he added, “will strengthen our clean transportation infrastructure, help mitigate some of the worst effects of climate change, and accelerate new projects that will create thousands of jobs.”

Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, urged Republicans to oppose the bill, and Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the minority whip, warned that spending “will lead to more inflation.” But 13 House Republicans crossed partisan lines to help pass the measure.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican and president of the National Governors Association, praised Congress for “putting partisan differences aside to pass a bill that works for the American people.”

With nearly $600 billion in new federal aid to improve highways, bridges, dams, public transportation, rail, ports, airports, water quality, and broadband over 10 years, the legislation is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform the nation’s public labor system. It provides a rare opportunity for nations that for decades have had to balance the huge short-term backlog of repairs and upgrades against larger, longer-term projects and needs.

Although the federal expenditures are less generous than President Biden initially suggested, they are still enormous by all accounts. According to the White House, transportation assistance alone is the largest federal investment in transit history and the largest federal investment in passenger rail since Amtrak was created in 1971.

About $110 billion will be allocated to roads, bridges and other major road transportation projects. Another $66 billion will go to passenger and freight trains, including enough money to get rid of Amtrak’s maintenance backlog. However, another $39 billion will modernize public transportation, and another $11 billion will be allocated to transportation safety, including programs to reduce deaths among pedestrians and cyclists.

Broadband systems will get $65 billion, as well as investments to rebuild the power grid to renovate power lines and absorb renewable energy sources. A $55 billion fund package will expand access to clean drinking water. About $25 billion will go to airports and $17 billion to ports.

Government agencies will determine which projects are funded, but some of the state’s priorities were written into the bill during negotiations.

For example, many provisions report Alaska, of which Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, was a core member of the bipartisan group of senators who helped craft the legislation. The bill includes $250 million for a pilot program to develop an electric or low-emission ferry that will almost certainly go to her state, which has the most miles of sea highways.

Another $1 billion program will pay for the ferry system to reach rural communities such as those in Alaska; The bill allows highways to be operated and maintained in federal dollars. Other parts of the bill will pay for repairs to more than 140 bridges, along with the more than 300 miles of highway that stretches across the Alaskan border into Canada.

West Virginia senators Joe Manchin III, a Democrat, and Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, also helped craft parts of the legislation, which includes a $2 billion rural grant program that is expected to direct funding toward the Appalachian highway system. An extension of this system, Corridor H—which aims to connect Interstate 79 in north-central West Virginia to Interstate 81 in Virginia—has not been completed for more than half a century, but it will begin now. The bill also pumps more than $11 billion into a program to remove toxic leaks from abandoned coal mines, a project estimated to cost at least $2 billion in West Virginia alone.

However, the legislation will mostly address public works challenges that have long baffled the political and financial ability of states to address them. Experts predicted that it will reshape priorities across the country and advance important projects.

For example, New Jersey could take advantage of the new money to help build the proposed Gateway Tunnel, relieving chronic congestion on the train route that connects the state’s population centers to New York. Nearly a decade after Hurricane Sandy flooded the tunnel to New York, causing structural damage, progress has stalled amid estimates as high as $13 billion to complete repairs.

Along the Gulf Coast, Louisiana officials are looking to funds to help speed up a long-studied commuter rail line between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. In the Pacific Northwest, where the Highway 5 connecting Oregon and Washington on the Columbia River is at risk of collapsing in a major earthquake, the spending could help settle years of political wrangling and pay for a new, more flexible structure with room for bikes. Walkways and pedestrians.

In Michigan, the bill would inject a record $1 billion into a decade-old program to restore and protect the Great Lakes, where drinking water and wildlife have been endangered by pollution. In Wyoming, where an annual threat of avalanches shuts Wyoming Highway 22 through the mountains, hampering commercial traffic, a tunnel through the Teton Pass could help fund.

The legislation also provides a critical lifeline for states and cities struggling to reduce greenhouse gas pollution in the face of the mounting disruptions caused by climate change. In the Northeast, $7.5 billion in funding for zero-emission, low-emission buses and ferries in Connecticut and New Jersey could help electrify municipal bus fleets. A loan program in the bill would also help local governments in states like Michigan set up projects to reduce risks and damage from severe flooding and beach erosion.

Other parts of the legislation will address the longstanding civic equity and design issues created by old highway projects, which divided many cities, flattened homes and historic monuments and exacerbated auto dependency and segregation. In Minnesota, it could move forward with a proposed renovation of the I-94 corridor between St. Paul and Minneapolis, reconnecting neighborhoods that were cut off from each other in the 1960s. And in Connecticut, it could boost projects to help reunite sections of Hartford and East Hartford that have been torn apart by the highway for more than 60 years.

However, few states are likely to feel the impact of this measure as widely as California, where 40 million people have become dependent on highways, canals, seawalls, dams and other engineering work to maintain their way of life.

The state, which is suffering from severe drought and raging wildfires, has poured billions of dollars in recent years into water conservation, deforestation, firefighting and renewable energy initiatives. State officials said federal funds will ship that payment.

For example, an estimate of more than $8 billion for western water projects includes billions for water recycling and groundwater storage systems, which is critical to California’s conservation efforts. More funding in the bill will help modernize aging dams and canals and possibly underwrite desalination projects.

Disaster funds in this measure will help mitigate the risk and impact of wildfires and other natural disasters, allowing the state, for example, to bury power lines in rural areas where sparks from old equipment have unleashed some of California’s most destructive infernos. There will also be federal funding to make the salaries of federal prairie firefighters on a par with the state’s much better-paid fire crews, and to address the acute shortage of experienced crews in a state where most wildland forests are on federal land.

New federal money could provide a boost, too, for the high-speed rail line that California has been trying for a decade to build between its largest city and its central rural valley. In recent years, only the completion of an electric route between Merced and Bakersfield has been a priority. But with the extra funding, state officials say they can expand into the Bay Area and the Los Angeles Basin, connecting one of the state’s most depressed areas with major cities and better-paying jobs.

However, only a small part of that measure has been anticipated in California: a $7.5 billion initiative to build a nationwide network of chargers for electric cars. Although 40 percent of electric cars in the US are sold in California, sales are still lagging in part because car buyers fear they won’t be able to recharge easily on long car trips. So far, even long-distance electric cars — Teslas, for example — lack the ability to make the 400-mile journey between San Francisco and Los Angeles without stopping to charge.

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