Welch Will Push To Spend Billions Repairing Infrastructure

AP/Toby Talbot

An I-89 overpass in Montpelier. Congressman Peter Welch says legislation supporting the country's transportation and communications infrastructure has a decent chance of passing this year.

(Host) Congressman Peter Welch is backing a multi-billion dollar plan to repair the country's transportation and communications infrastructure.

Welch is convinced that voters will support new revenue to pay for the legislation, because he says it will have a positive impact on the economy at both the local and national level.

VPR's Bob Kinzel reports.

(Kinzel) Welch readily acknowledges that it will be very difficult to find bipartisan support on most of the major issues facing Congress this year.

But he thinks legislation that allocates several billion dollars to repair the country's transportation and communications infrastructure has a decent chance of passing.

(Welch) "Our roads, our bridges, things that are important to our communities and to our state, our airports, our broadband deployment that is not 21^st century caliber, I mean we are not world class in our infrastructure. We all know it's deteriorating and there is a real upside economically to investing in our infrastructure and there's real dire consequences of letting it become degraded."

(Kinzel) Welch thinks the bill could receive some bipartisan support because he says this is a problem that affects virtually every House district.

(Welch) "I know when I talk to a lot of my Republican colleagues they are with that because whether are a Republican or a Democrat we all have roads and bridges that need to be repaired, we all have broadband that needs to be deployed, airports that have to be modernized and I think that would help our local communities as well."

(Kinzel) Welch says new revenue will be needed to pay for the legislation. He says many members oppose efforts to increase the federal gas tax so he's looking at a tax assessment that would be applied to the wholesale production of oil.

(Welch) "People know you can't get something for nothing and what their resistance to often times when you're talking about any kind of revenue source is their skepticism that we'll get the revenue and we'll just spend it somewhere else. Whereas if they see that their roads are really getting repaired, the bridges are fixed, they've got broadband deployed to their home then they understand what they're paying for and they're seeing that what they're paying for they're getting."

(Kinzel) Welch says he's encouraged by the initial response that he's gotten to this legislation but he's still concerned that the bill could become a victim of election year politics in Washington.

For VPR News, I'm Bob Kinzel in Montpelier