Delay in funding measure clouds state highway plans

Phil Hagen

Thursday, Sept. 25, 1997 | 10:46 a.m.

The six-year-old federal highway construction funding law, due to expire in six days, could live six months longer.

The House Transportation Committee voted Wednesday to extend the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (better known as ISTEA) after Chairman Bud Shuster, R-Pa., couldn't work out a deal for his BESTEA (Building Efficient Surface Transportation and Equity Act of 1997) as a replacement.

Though this could leave funding for Nevada's future transportation projects up in the air until next spring, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., sees the glass as half full, with potential for more money, rather than half empty, with potential for less.

"We're actually hoping to do better than BESTEA," he said from his Washington office. "This gives us six months of time to work with the chairman to improve Nevada's standing."

Shuster's three-year, $103 billion proposal would increase transportation spending by 30 percent above the level of the past three years. But Gibbons says it doesn't give Nevada, one of the fastest-growing states in America, the cut it deserves.

On average, Nevada receives $103 million a year in federal transportation funds. Under BESTEA, in the 1998 budget year, that would drop to $99.5 million, according to a recent analysis.

"I wasn't pleased with the last go-round and amount of money proposed to send to Nevada," Gibbons said. "Now we can get in there and work with the leadership on this issues and make Nevada come out in a little better place."

Meantime, funding for several key Nevada highway projects will be on hold, including a Carson City bypass and the widening of Interstate 15 between Southern California and Las Vegas.

Additionally, Gibbons will have to reapply the pressure on the House committee for $184 million in special ISTEA funding for a long-awaited bridge over the Colorado River near Hoover Dam. It was left out of the original House proposal.

Tom Stephens, state transportation director, wasn't surprised that the fight for the new bill resulted in an extension of the old one. But even if Congress let it lapse, "we probably could get along till April -- that's when bond payments are due from our past projects."

Still, he was "hopeful to have a bill to rely on for the next three to six years, which would provide us with a planning horizon and a steady flow of funding."

In the Senate, Harry Reid, D-Nev., was a little less patient with the House's progress.

"There's no movement if we're going to have a six-month bill," he said. "These bills are six years, not six months. They've been held up since Shuster didn't get the votes he wanted when he tried to increase the funding. So now he's going with the sixth-month bill and do the big bill later -- which doesn't help us with any of our problems."

In May, Gibbons voted against Shuster's attempt to push through $12 billion for transportation to the balanced budget deal between Congress and President Clinton. The effort failed 216-214. Rep. John Ensign, R-Nev., did not vote.

Reid sits on a key Senate committee, Environment and Public Works, that last week unanimously approved a six-year transportation bill that stays within balanced-budget targets.

In that bill, a compromise among senators from various regions of the country, Reid had language inserted into the Federal Lands Highway Program that directs funding toward the construction of the new Hoover Dam bridge. That would make the project eligible for parts of four pots of highway money: discretionary, Indian reservation, forest highway and the new Cooperative Federal Lands Highway Program.