Financing Transportation

Description

MODERATOR: Mortimer Downey III, Former Deputy Secretary of Transportation

PANEL: Dr. Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Director, Mineta Transportation Institute’s National Transportation Finance Research Center
Steve Heminger, Executive Director, San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission
John Horsley, Executive Director, American Association of State Highway
and Transportation Officials
Will Kempton – CEO, Orange County Transportation Authority (invited)
Michael Melaniphy, President & CEO, American Public Transportation Association
TITLE: Financing Transportation: Are We Becoming a Second-Class Nation?
DATE: Friday, June 22, 2012

TIME: 9 a.m. Continental Breakfast/ Check-In | 9:30 am Program |10:30-11 am Q & A

PLACE: SF Club Office: 595 Market St., 2nd floor

PRICE: FREE: For tickets call 415/597-6705 or register at http://www.commonwealthclub.org

CONTACT: Riki Rafner, Public Relations Director, 415/597-6712
Charlotte Greenwood, Public Relations Fellow

Media people interested in attending should please RSVP to [email protected] by 5 p.m. the day before the event.

Co-sponsored by the Mineta Transportation Institute
______________________________________________________________________

Experts note that the single strongest indicator of a country’s economic competitiveness is how efficiently it can move people to work and its products to the market. Every industrialized country in the world invests a much higher percentage of its GDP into transportation infrastructure than the US. As a result, we are facing a transportation funding crisis.

Bridges need repair, potholes are damaging cars and injuring hundreds of drivers, transit fares are rising as services are reduced, highways are increasingly congested, and buses are overcrowded and frequently late. Are our transportation systems in a state of emergency? Is our failing transportation infrastructure turning us into a second class country? Many experts would say yes.

The projected growth of our nation’s population within the next 20 years, combined with long overdue maintenance work on roads and mass transit, is adding pressure to the ongoing need for funds to improve and expand our transportation systems. Given the current economic slowdown, where and how can new transportation funding be found before it’s too late?

Our panel of experts will examine the possible solutions from a variety of perspectives, and they will review a newly completed national survey on this topic.
Panel moderator Mortimer Downey was Deputy Secretary of Transportation under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. He was a member of President Obama’s transportation policy committee during the 2008 electoral campaign and was head of the Department of Transportation transition team. He chairs the Mineta Transportation Institute Board of Trustees. He received a BA from Yale, a Master’s from NYU, and attended the Advanced Management Program at Harvard.
Dr. Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Director of the Mineta Transportation Institute’s National Transportation Finance Center, recently conducted a study concluding that voters do support certain types of transportation taxes. Dr. Agrawal is also an associate professor of urban and regional planning at San Jose State. She is a graduate of Harvard with a PhD from UC Berkeley.
Malcolm Dougherty, Director of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), leads one of the largest state transportation agencies in the US, having oversight for major highways, bridges, and other transportation infrastructure. [Education??]
Steve Heminger is Executive Director of the SF Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission. He was appointed to serve on the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, and he is chairman of the Toll Bridge Program Oversight Committee. Mr. Heminger is vice-chair of the Mineta Transportation Institute’s Board of Trustees. He received his Master’s from the University of Chicago and a BA from Georgetown.
John Horsley is Executive Director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, having dedicated his career to resolving the nation’s transportation issues.. A Harvard graduate, Mr. Horsley served at the U.S Department of Transportation as Assistant Secretary from 1993 to 1999, where he supported intermodal policies and quality of life initiatives.
Michael Melaniphy is President and CEO of the American Public Transportation Association, which is composed of public organizations engaged in mass transportation, as well as companies providing rail services nationwide. APTA also includes government agencies, metropolitan planning organizations, state departments of transportation, academic institutions, and trade publications. Prior to joining APTA, he was VP of the Public Sector for Motor Coach Industries.

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