A long-sought infrastructure bill will be a priority of the new House Democratic majority, and funding for the Gateway Tunnel will be part of it, key lawmakers told NJ Advance Media.
Top House Democrats said they want to put together a bill to repair America’s public works, from fixing roads and bridges to improving the electric grid. President Donald Trump had promised a massive infrastructure bill to create jobs, but his final product relied primarily on private funding and offered little in the way of federal aid. And then he reversed course and opposed Gateway.
This time around, the newly installed Democratic majority plans to assemble a list of projects to tackle, and lawmakers said Gateway was high on their list. Helping the case is the fact that New Jersey flipped four Republican-held congressional districts and has the sixth largest Democratic delegation in the House.
“We have 11 congresspeople here,” said Rep. Albio Sires, D-8th Dist. “And they all talk about the Gateway Tunnel."
Sires, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he has talked to the new chairman, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. who supports Gateway.
DeFazio told NJ Advance Media that he wanted to bring panel members for a first-hand look at the existing Hudson River train tunnels, damaged by Hurricane Sandy, as he puts together a new transportation bill.
“We are going to definitely address projects of national and regional significance,” DeFazio said. Gateway “is certainly very very high on the list."
And Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., the new House Appropriations Committee chairwoman, said “there is a lot of support” for federal funding of the project. “We will certainly address Gateway,” she said.
While the federal government under President Barack Obama initially pledged to pay half the cost of the new train tunnel under the Hudson River and the new Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River, Trump reversed course and threatened to shut down the government rather than provide any funding for Gateway.
“I can’t understand why the president just doesn’t get on board with the Gateway Tunnel,” said Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-12th Dist. “He lives in New York.”
Lowey succeeded Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-11th Dist., as Appropriations chair. Frelinghuysen initially secured $900 million for Gateway in the 2018 transportation spending bill but House Republican leaders undercut him by allowing a vote to rescind the funding. The motion failed due to overwhelming Democratic opposition since a majority of the GOP voted against Frelinghuysen.
Now the Democrats are in charge in the House.
That means U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate Democratic leader, now is joined by Lowey and the new House Democratic caucus chairman, Hakeem Jeffries, who also is from New York. And Rep. Frank Pallone, D-6th Dist., chairs the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, and while he doesn’t have any direct role in winning Gateway approval, he has the clout to make deals to get support for the tunnel.
“There’s a different hand to play for the president,” said Gov. Phil Murphy.
The last spending bill got around Trump’s veto threat and included $540 million for Gateway in different transportation accounts. U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., the top Democrat on the Senate mass transit subcommittee, said the pending transportation legislationdoes the same.
That’s one of the spending bills being held up by Trump’s refusal to fund the federal government unless the legislation includes more than $5 billion for a southern border wall he claimed Mexico would pay for.
Menendez said it was time to get a new funding agreement with Washington to allow Gateway to move forward at a quicker pace.
“We could move this project, which is a project of national significance, which would create an enormous number of jobs in terms of the construction phase and would create long-term prosperity,” Menendez said. “The states have put up more than their share now. There’s a lot of skin in the game. So has the Port Authority. What we need is a full funding agreement that can then green light the entire project moving forward.”
Still, one problem to overcome is opposition from lawmakers representing states that already get billions of dollars in extra federal funding, courtesy of states like New Jersey. Rep. Josh Gottheimer said some of his colleagues just don’t understand how important Gateway is to the national economy.
“Who are the people who don’t understand it? The moochers,” said Gottheimer, D-5th Dist. “They say, 'I don’t understand your obsession with the tunnel. I say, 'I don’t understand how we keep pouring money in your states to build roads to nowhere that no one drives on, and we’ve got infrastructure that is literally the main artery of our national economy.”