We need to make new investments in our nation’s roads, bridges, transit, and air transportation networks to connect our people and our businesses. That’s what The BUILD Act will do, and Senator Warner is an original co-sponsor of this bipartisan infrastructure bank proposal along with Sens. John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchison.

“In the current budget environment, we have to accept that we will have limited public dollars to spend on infrastructure investments,” Senator Warner told participants at today’s Progressive Policy Institute conference on Capitol Hill. “Scarce resources will mean that we have to be smarter and wiser in the investments that we make. Federal transportation policy must be grounded in these political and fiscal realities in order to strike the right balance between near-term discipline and investment in future growth.”

Among the other points made by Senator Warner:

• The American Society of Civil Engineers grades our country’s physical infrastructure as a “D,” and the Washington, DC region just got rated the #1 worst place in the country as far as traffic congestion is concerned.
• Our electrical grid is still constructed around the same model employed immediately after World War II. Power interruptions and outages cost American individuals and businesses at least $80 billion each year.
• Rebuilding America's infrastructure should be a bipartisan national priority. The Kerry/Hutchison/Warner legislation would establish a $10 billion fund to encourage private investment in large public works projects.
• This $10 billion in public money could leverage up to $640 billion in private investment over 10 years for American infrastructure projects.