Tuesday's hearing, "Innovative Project Finance," was called by committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-California. She said she believes the TIFIA program has been successful in recent years but is too small to be effective for larger projects such as the "30/10 initiative" proposed in Los Angeles to build 30 years worth of planned mass-transit projects in a single decade.

Boxer held a field hearing in August in California to discuss this same issue of supporting state and local community initiatives such as 30/10 by expanding federal credit programs to help leverage dollars to complete projects faster. (see Aug. 27 AASHTO Journal story)

"We believe there needs to be some enhancements to the TIFIA program," Stephanie Kopelousos, Florida transportation secretary, said Tuesday during her opening statement as a witness before the EPW Committee. "We are looking for some more flexibility in what programs can apply and an increase in the eligible loan amount of project costs, which is currently set at 33%."

The main criticism of the existing TIFIA program is that it examines requests on a project-by-project basis instead of considering a bigger picture. Also, TIFIA it is only authorized by Congress to distribute up to $122 million a year.

Roy Kienitz, undersecretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation, testified Tuesday that, in its upcoming surface transportation reauthorization proposal (expected to be released in early February), the Obama administration is working on ways to improve the financing tools that are available to state and local communities interested in undertaking larger projects similar to the 30/10 initiative.

"We want to be able to mix grants and loans in a flexible way and to do it without being dependant on mode in a way that is driven by sound analytics," Kienitz said in his opening statement. "We want to create an organization, preferably within DOT, whose job it will be to deal with those multimodal investments."

Boxer criticized the administration's proposal to create a national infrastructure bank. Instead, she said she prefers USDOT place its focus on improving programs that are already in place such as TIFIA. She said she wants to improve TIFIA so that communities throughout the country could benefit more by leveraging federal dollars to build transportation projects faster if those communities have guaranteed revenue (such as tolls) coming in once a project is finished.

"I care that the federal government is able to leverage state and local funding in a way that doesn't put the taxpayers at risk and accelerates projects and creates jobs and does it soon," Boxer said in response to Kienitz.

The consensus of the panelists testifying in front of the committee was that it doesn't matter what the name of the program is for the next reauthorization bill. The most important thing is that states have a way to leverage their funds through a federal credit program in a way that would allow them to expedite payment on construction projects that would otherwise take twice as long to complete.

A video of this hearing as well as all witness statements are available at bit.ly/092810EPW.