Infrastructure Alert - July 24, 2012

On July 6, President Obama signed the transportation reauthorization bill, culminating a three-year stretch of bipartisan back and forth over highway and transit spending. Last week, the US Conference of Mayors released its annual U.S. Metro Economies Report which indicated American cities will become more congested, straining their transportation systems. At the state level, Georgia is scheduled to hold a referendum for a proposed one-cent transportation sales tax to raise revenues for future infrastructure projects.

On the Hill

On July 6, President Obama signed the bipartisan transportation bill. The law provides $100 billion in transportation spending for the next 27 months and also extends the federal flood insurance program for five years.

Significantly, the law as enacted is aimed at greatly enhancing the scope of the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA). TIFIA funding will be increased from $122 million to $1 billion, with the ability to lend up to $10 billion. The law expanded the program's eligibility by eliminating a series of onerous requirements for project selection, including a substantial environmental requirement. The Department of Transportation Credit Council will now approve projects based on creditworthiness and the loans will be disbursed on a rolling basis. The transportation bill also creates the National Public Transportation Safety Program. The program will allow the Department of Transportation to put in place new federal safety requirements for mass transit.

In other federal news, last week, the Congressional Budget Office released a report titled "Infrastructure Banks and Surface Transportation." The CBO stated that an infrastructure bank could enhance investment in surface transportation projects by providing new federal subsidies in the form of loans to a limited number of large projects. The CBO also considered such large projects would have significant national or regional economic benefits. Proposals for infrastructure banks that had requirements for internal mechanisms to generate revenue, such as tolls, were considered potentially too restrictive for many potential applicants.

The GAO released a report last week indicating that while the federal government is making substantial progress in implementing the OMB's cloud computing initiative, they are having problems implementing cloud services. The OMB policy, called "Cloud First," requires that agencies utilize cloud services...