Transit Legislative Update, July 31, 2015

This week, Congress took two noteworthy actions involving transit:

1) The House and Senate voted to provide a short-term funding patch so that federal surface transportation spending can continue until the fall.

2) The Senate passed the Drive Act, its surface transportation reauthorization bill to establish policy for transit and highways for the next six years. TWU opposes this legislation.

Senate approval of the Drive Act is only the first step in the process to pass a surface transportation bill. The House and Senate both have to pass identical versions of any piece of legislation before it is sent to the President. This fall, the House hopes to write and pass its own version of the bill. Then the House and Senate will form a Conference Committee to negotiate and write a bill that has identical text, which would have to be voted on again by the House and Senate. Only then would a bill be sent to the White House where President Obama would either sign it into law or veto it. TWU will fight for our members in every part of this process.

The House and Senate agreed to extend funding for highway and transit programs for the next several months. This short-term extension will provide funding until at least October 29, although it may last into mid-December. (They cannot provide a specific expiration date because of uncertainties in Highway Trust Fund spending.) This patch provides Congress with several months to negotiate a long-term surface transportation reauthorization bill to create policy for highways, transit, bridges and other programs.

The Senate passed its surface bill, the Drive Act, on Thursday. It would create a new section of transit law, “expedited project delivery for capital investment grants,” to fast track transit grants for capital projects using public-private partnerships (PPPs). This provision is likely to increase privatization of transit service, particularly when PPPs are used to expand transit service (for example, if a transit agency builds a new light rail line). Private transit companies are often anti-union, which pay lower wages, eliminate pensions, cut transit service, and mistreat riders. The provision allows PPP projects to avoid the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) grant process and projects could ignore longstanding criteria used to evaluate whether the initiatives are worthy of federal support. No minimum level of private investment would be required to receive the taxpayer subsidy. This language is an attack on our jobs and TWU will continue to fight back as the Congress works on this legislation in the next few months.

The Drive Act would create a new drug and alcohol testing system for bus and truck drivers using hair samples, a method with an inherent racial bias. Studies and experience show that hair is susceptible to passive contamination, or the absorption of drugs found in the environment. This means an individual’s hair could contain traces of a drug used illegally by another person in the vicinity of that person or found on the surface of a location visited. Different types of testing results are affected by hair color and hair treatments. In fact, studies have shown that darker hair retains drugs more than lighter hair. To put it plainly: we believe this testing method has an inherent racial bias against people of color because lighter hair has been shown to retain less drug residue than dark hair. This means that people who were exposed to the same drug at the same time in the same place could have different hair testing results simply because of their race or ethnicity.

The Drive Act also eliminates the requirement that transit representatives have a vote on metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) around the country. MPOs coordinate regional transportation planning to identify projects for federal support. This change would bias MPO decisions against public transportation, increasing traffic jams in suburbs and cities around the country.

As outlined in the last memo, TWU fought for provisions that were included in the final Senate bill which would improve health and safety for our members. The Drive Act requires the U.S. Department of Transportation to study providing restroom access for transit workers and transit operator safety — including installing barriers to protect operators from assault. It also offers budget flexibility to help transit systems avoid service cuts and layoffs in areas where unemployment suddenly spikes to 7 percent.

Over the next few months, the U.S. House of Representatives will draft its own version of the Drive Act. TWU will continue to be there fighting for our members throughout that process.