Obama warns of infrastructure decline in speech urging Congress to act

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/14/obama-infrastructure-decline-speech-congress

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More than 700,000 construction jobs are at risk if Congress fails to rescue an ailing federal infrastructure fund with new financing, US president Barack Obama has warned.

In the latest in a series of increasingly anguished administration interventions on the subject of transport investment, the president flew to the site of a new bridge project on New York's Hudson river to make a speech warning of the dangers of long-term decline in infrastructure spending.

The issue is coming to a head this month as Congress struggles to agree a new transport bill without which the Highway Trust Fund faces possible insolvency as early as August, according to the US Department of Transportation.

“If they don't act by the end of the summer, federal funding for transportation projects will run out,” said Obama in a speech in front of the Tappan Zee bridge at Tarrytown, New York.

Although a bipartisan group of senators, led by Barbara Boxer of California, is working on a possible deal to avert a crisis, it is fast becoming the latest symbol of deadlock between the two parties on spending issues.

Obama warned that the US has slid to 19th place in international league tables of transport infrastructure over recent years.

“Building a world class transport system is one of the reasons America became an economic superpower in the first place … but our investment in transport has shrunk by 50%,” he said.

“We have got 100,000 bridges that are old enough to qualify for Medicare.”

Vice-president Joe Biden made a similar call for greater investment in infrastructure investment in a speech on Wednesday in Cleveland, Ohio.

The White House also announced a series of executive actions designed to speed up the permitting process for new projects such as the Tappan Zee bridge, which it said had been reduced to 1.5 years from a typical 3-4 year approval process.