TE on the Chopping Block…Again



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ASLA working to preserve the Cardin-Cochran agreement.

With a June 30 deadline rapidly approaching, House and Senate transportation reauthorization bill conferees continue to work to seek consensus on a long-term transportation bill. This week, the architects of the Senate-passed bipartisan MAP-21 (S. 1813), Senators Barbara Boxer (CA) and James Inhofe (OK), sent their counterparts in the House of Representatives a surface transportation reauthorization proposal based largely on MAP-21. House conferees reviewed the proposal and were expected to issue a counteroffer before recessing this week.

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Items of contention among conferees include proposals to expedite the Keystone Oil pipeline, funding concerns, and, notably to the landscape architecture community, calls from House Republican conferees to eliminate the Transportation Enhancements (TE) program. Some legislators and activists believed that a compromise on TE was struck when the Senate accepted an amendment to S. 1813, MAP-21 by Senators Ben Cardin (MD) and Thad Cochran (MS) that would allow local communities to seek Transportation Enhancements funding through a competitive grant process. This carefully crafted agreement balances the desire to devolve transportation decision making from the federal and state level to the local level, with the continued demand for Transportation Enhancements projects. ASLA is working to preserve the Cardin-Cochran agreement in the final surface transportation conference report. ASLA also urges its members to take a moment to use the Advocacy Network to send a message to their elected officials that the Cardin-Cochran agreement must be included in any final transportation reauthorization package.

ASLA is also working alongside members of the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition to urge transportation bill conferees to retain in the final conference report a provision that provides $700 million annually for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) over the next two years and reauthorization of the program through 2022. To date, a bipartisan group of nearly 100 members of Congress has signed onto letters to conference committee co-chairs Senator Barbara Boxer (CA) and Representative John Mica (FL) asking for the inclusion of the LWCF provisions.

ASLA continues to closely follow the transportation reauthorization conference committee and advocate for the inclusion of ASLA priority programs like TE and LWCF in any final transportation package.

For more on ASLA’s transportation priorities, visit www.asla.org/advocacy.

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