Lobbyist Brandy Tomhave of The Tomhave Group, who has advocated in Washington, D.C., on behalf of Navajo County’s rural and tribal communities for the past 10 years, braced the Board of Supervisors last week for mixed news on federal support of the county’s struggling roads system. She prefaced her message with the words, “We have good news and we have bad news, but would you expect anything else from Washington?”
Tomhave updated the board on the status of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) highway bill that authorizes federal spending on projects at the state, local and tribal levels for roads, bridges and transit.
“The good news is that Congress is finally poised to pass a six-year reauthorization bill that might become law by this Thanksgiving. The bad news is: it’s a ‘turkey,’” she said.
Tomhave explained, “No matter what version of the bill the President signs into law–be it the version the Senate passed last July or the version the House just passed last week, or some combination of the two–our next highway bill will be flat-funded, with only increases for cost of living.
“It will provide no new funding for anything, including the Indian School Bus Routes Maintenance Program we worked so hard to try to include through an amendment authored by Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick. It will do nothing to address our nation’s backlog of infrastructure needs.”
MAP-21 is a highway funding and authorization bill to govern U.S. federal surface transportation spending. It was passed by Congress on June 29, 2012, and then signed into effect by President Obama on July 6 of that year.
Tomhave pointed out that the bill was only authorized through 2014, and since then “has been limping along under short-term continuing resolutions, creating havoc on state and local projects.”
The bill’s reauthorization would provide state departments of transportation and counties the predictability needed to plan roads maintenance budgets.
“If Congress can’t provide you new funding, they at least want to provide you with new efficiencies by cutting red tape,” she said, such as by streamlining the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)–which requires federal agencies to prepare an environmental impact statement for all reports and recommendations that involve federal funding on a federal, state or local level–and by spurring more public-private partnerships.
“But it’s important to understand the motivation behind this spirit of innovation: Money. There just is not enough of it in the Highway Trust Fund to pay for the cost of the federal highway bill, and there hasn’t been since 1993 because there is not enough support in Congress to raise the gas tax that pays for the Highway Trust Fund.
“To get its bill fully funded for all six years, the House, in desperation, has proposed to raid the Federal Reserves Capital Surplus account. The Senate, by contrast, has yet to figure out how to pay for the last three years of its bill, so we’ll see in the next few weeks if this turkey can fly,” she said.
Locally, this means that Navajo County’s tribal roads would continue to suffer the worst, specifically the dirt roads on the Navajo Nation on which children are bussed to central county school districts.
Regarding these routes, Tomhave noted, “The safety and reliability of your roads network is limited by its weakest link. These roads can become sinkholes every time it rains.
“Unfortunately, we were unable to get our reauthorizing amendment into the next highway bill because Congress simply refuses to consider any new spending,” she said.
According to Tomhave, a two-pronged alternative is under way to leverage funding from the Federal Lands Access Program, which maintains roads that serve national forests and parks, and from the National Parks Service, which has a substantial road maintenance budget, to assist the county with resurfacing these roads. A commitment has been reached to evaluate how to pool these agency resources, she said.
“Of course, you can’t just throw money at a problem and expect anything to change. We have also been trying to change the NEPA requirements that make it so difficult to improve the roads that too often become impossible for students in the Winslow and Holbrook school districts to get to school if they live on the Navajo Nation.”
Tomhave reported that a NEPA waiver has been crafted that will permit county road yards personnel to apply gravel to the affected tribal roads during the “mud months.”
“Another no-cost solution that we have accomplished this year is getting a first-of-its-kind study by the Government Accountability Office to determine the impact that tribal dirt roads are having on school attendance, she noted.”
The agency says its priority, and task, has been to get decision-makers at the nation’s capital to see the county’s issues objectively.
“The challenge is that most of them have never been here. And even those who have visited this beautiful part of our country have never been on roads like these. So when we talk to them about this situation, we struggle to get them to understand its scope and import,” Tomhave explained.
“This study will connect the dots between education and infrastructure. We will make sure that Navajo County school superintendents are plugged into this very important, historic study.”
