"If we're not going to do the six-year bill in the balance of this Congress, then we ought to do a one-year authorization in the hope that the new Congress will come to agreement on a financing mechanism for a six-year bill," Oberstar, D-Minnesota, said during Tuesday's meeting with journalists.

The 2005 surface transportation law known as "SAFETEA-LU" expired Sept. 30, 2009, and has been extended by Congress five times. Oberstar moved a draft bill through his panel's Highways and Transit Subcommittee in July 2009, but declined to bring that measure up for consideration in the full committee because of lack of consensus on how to pay for a vastly expanded bill. While the 2005 bill authorized $286 billion in federal highway and transit program investment, Oberstar's draft bill proposed $450 billion for highways and transit plus a new commitment of $50 billion for high-speed rail.

Oberstar said his 18 terms in Congress, including the last four as House T&I Committee chairman, were guided by the principles of supporting infrastructure investments that maintain a strong, healthy, growing, and mobile economy for America.

"I come to the end of a career in Congress having lived, I believe, faithfully and studiously and vigorously to those purposes," he said.

Oberstar's work in Congress goes all the way back to 1963, when he worked as a clerk on the Rivers and Harbors Subcommittee, which no longer exists. The 76-year-old from Chisholm, Minnesota, easily won re-election in 2008 to his 18th term representing Minnesota's 8th Congressional District with 68% of the vote. But this year Oberstar was caught up in the Republican wave, losing his re-election bid to Chip Cravaack, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy Reserve.

Among the topics Oberstar addressed Tuesday:

• EARMARKS: The chairman called efforts to ban earmarks "rather simplistic," noting that the secrecy surrounding many earmarks is the problem, not earmarks themselves. If members of Congress do not designate where the resources of the federal government are invested, "then the executive branch -- either at the national level or at the state level -- makes all those decisions and members and the people that members of Congress represent are without a voice," Oberstar said. He said future surface transportation reauthorization bills should follow an open procedure where lawmakers can earmark spending for important projects in their districts but with openness and assurance from state and local officials that the project is desired and will be carried out.
  
  
• OBAMA'S $50 BILLION FUNDING PROPOSAL: Oberstar said the president's recent proposal to frontload a long-term surface transportation reauthorization bill with an additional $50 billion in federal investment for transportation projects should be considered separately. "He phrased it in the context of a continuing stimulus," Oberstar said. "That's a reasonable thing to do and it should be understood in the context of a stimulus initiative, not as a substitute for a long-term authorization."
  
  
• HIGH-SPEED RAIL: Newly elected Republican governors who vow to kill their state's high-speed-rail projects are being "terribly shortsighted," Oberstar said. Noting he had spent five days in France last month that included traveling on the high-speed TGV train, Oberstar joked "it's interesting to come back to a Third World country." Regarding America's economic competitiveness with European nations, he said, "We're just sitting on the sidelines while they are eating our lunch."
  
  
• THE FUTURE: Oberstar said his future plans haven't quite been sorted out two weeks after his electoral defeat. "I do not see my name in any lobbying firm -- that's as much as I know right now," he said. "I want to be of service to transportation in the broadest policy sense of the term, particularly to safety, to a new rural view of America, and to a new urbanism."

A video of Oberstar's entire meeting with reporters Tuesday is available at bit.ly/Oberstar111610.