Senate passes recovery bill

House, Senate must compromise

Steve Hawley, Feb 10, 09.

The Senate passed its version of the recovery bill 61-37 earlier today, and the House and Senate must now work on a compromise bill, according to the New York Times. Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas both voted against the bill. The Bond and Boxer/Inhoff amendments, which together would have stripped $7.5 billion in transit and rail funding while adding tens of billions to highway projects, never made it to the floor for a vote.

Barry Goodman, one of our board members, developed a spreadsheet of a breakdown of the spending in the Senate bill (.xls). These numbers include the bipartisan compromise fostered by Senators Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine. Here are some of the figures:

Highways: $27.06 billion
Discretionary grants: $5.5 billion

Transit grants: $8.4 billion
High-Speed Rail Corridor Program: $2 billion
Amtrak: $850 million
Intercity rail grants: $250 million
Rail modernization: $0
Transit new starts: $0

Transit/rail total: $11.5 billion

The $5.5 billion in discretionary grants can be spent on either highways or transit, so it is not included in the transit and rail total.

The House bill, by comparison, calls for $30 billion in highway spending and $13.1 billion for rail and transit. The House bill provides less money for transit grants and Amtrak and no money for the high-speed rail program, but it allocates $2.5 billion to transit new starts and $2 billion to rail modernization.