Item 2C: Ratification of IGR Committee Minutes

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was highly unlikely that Congress would be able to complete it before the end of this legislative session or the end of the calendar year. Under Congressman DeFazio, the House Subcommittee had reported on the bill last year, but it hadn't gotten any farther. It never got through full committee and the Senate had never taken it up. Financing continued to be a problem. Mr. Smith explained that the federal transportation program was funded primarily by the federal gasoline tax, and that model no longer worked. The federal gas tax was at 18 cents per gallon, and for the last nearly three years, the receipts of the trust fund had not been able to keep up with expenditures. As a result the trust fund had been operating in a deficit mode. Congress had been forced to backfill that with general ap- propriations and needed to find a new model for funding the program going forward. Many different scena- rios had been discussed, from private financing to vehicle miles traveled tax. There had not been enough attention paid to the financing side to develop any kind of consensus. There would not be a transportation bill this year, and it would be spilled over into 2011. He said that a new Congress would be beginning in January. Mr. Smith explained that the same was true with the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), the Ar- my Corps of Engineers water program that funded many projects locally, including the West Eugene Wet- land, Amazon Creek, and Delta Ponds. The House had moved forward with a WRDA reauthorization bill and had put out a request for projects. The COE had submitted projects. The Senate had also put out a request for projects. The COE brought a project to the Senate recently, but it was unlikely the reauthoriza- tion would be passed this year. Mr. Smith explained that the projects listed on the 2010 UF Appropriations document were submitted as part of the federal fiscal year 2011 appropriations process. They were approved by the delegation and put forward, and were under consideration. The House had just begun marking up some of the bills in subcom- mittee that week and would continue to do so over the course of the summer. Congress would go out for recess during the month of August, and would come back after Labor Day. They had targeted early October for adjournments so members of Congress could go home to run for re-election. Unfortunately, Congress would not finish the appropriations bills before the end of the fiscal year, and would put them off until after the election. This meant the earliest the appropriations process would be complete would be December. He explained that SDA was continuing to press on these projects and were closely monitoring subcommittee markups. There was a chance that the Transportation, HUD and subcommittee might markup the DOT bill on July 1. He said that SDA would be watching the projects to see if they do projects at subcommittee or whether they wait and do projects at full committee. Ms. Wilson said that this put UF in a strange situation, because the end of June and early July they would be making their list for the next round of federal appropriations. The UF may not know which projects would be funded until the end of the year, but that was too late for the UF to decide. As a result, they would go through their internal process where they started to gather information for projects on the chance that some of them would be funded, and whether any of them needed to come off the list. One of the golden rules for the UF was once a project was on the list, it was left on the list unless they had a really good reason to take it off because their Congressional delegation was already working on these requests. Some of them, like Forest Legacy, continued each year. UF was very lucky to have Senators Wyden and Merkley submit so many of their appropriations request, because this was not traditionally how that process worked. UF would continue to work on the local and regional level to make sure their projects were higher up on the list. Even though UF would not know the fate of some of the projects until the end of the year, Ms. Wilson would still begin the process. She said that she was drafting an email to the executives, Mayor Piercy and Eugene City Council to let them know that now was the time to start sending her their ideas and their wish lists. UF would work with SDA to see if there were funding opportunities that fit those projects or ideas. They would also examine why there were no funding opportunities that existed if that were the case. MINUTES—Council Committee on Intergovernmental Relations June 30, 2010 Page 9