At its Fall Board meeting the week of Oct. 20, AASHTO approved a proposal from its SAFETEA-LU reauthorization task force to recommend to Congress that next year's surface transportation legislation authorize $544.5 billion in new funding. This would almost double the $286 billion authorized over six years in SAFETEA-LU. AASHTO recommended a menu of different measures that could be used to raise the revenue necessary to fund the program at this level, including:
The container shipping fee would be maintained in a new and separate freight fund account.
The AASHTO proposal also recommended a number of reforms to the program. Chief among them is to limit the amount of funds that can be earmarked for specific projects to no more than 5% of total spending. In SAFETEA-LU members of Congress earmarked 18% of the program for specific projects.
AASHTO also recommended consolidating the number of funding programs from more than 100 to six key programs as follows: