Brown: Bipartisan Infrastructure Investments are Growing Our Economy

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, delivered the following opening statement at today's hearing entitled, "Long-Term Economic Benefits and Impacts from Federal Infrastructure and Public Transportation Investment."

Sen. Brown's remarks, as prepared for delivery follow:

For too long, too many people in Ohio and across the nation thought, for good reason, that their leaders had given up making our infrastructure and manufacturing base the best in the world.

Congress's inaction and the empty promises of presidents of both parties left Americans to fend for themselves as they swerved to avoid ever bigger potholes, and as they bypassed dilapidated bridges, and as they dodged chunks of concrete falling from decaying overpasses, and as they waited longer and longer for buses that were getting older and older.

Americans saw the consequences of years of inaction.

And they watched as other countries - our competitors and our adversaries alike - added high speed rail, built better roads, upgraded their water and sewer, installed 5G networks.

Our failing infrastructure was only compounded by a misguided tax and trade policy that shuttered factories in places like Zanesville, Mansfield, and Chillicothe and jobs shipped overseas.

At last week's hearing, I talked about how our economy and national security interests are interconnected.

Ensuring that the United States leads the world in producing semiconductor chips is critical to both our entire economy and our national security.

Because of the work of many of the Senators on this Committee, we passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Chips and Science Act.

But people don't really care that we passed a bill. They care about results. So today, let's look at the results:

More than 60,000 infrastructure projects are already underway across the country, because of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

These projects are improving 165,000 miles of road. More than 9,400 bridges are getting repaired.

Every state is benefitting. The Mobile River Bridge in Alabama is getting improvements. Rural and tribal communities in Minnesota, Idaho, and other states are getting new buses and vans. We are making bus and rail stations that were built before the Americans with Disabilities Act finally accessible in places like Philadelphia and Cleveland.

Six years ago, Rob Portman and I introduced the Bridge Investment Act, to replace or repair the hundreds of bridges in Ohio and thousands around the country that in many cases had not had serious repairs in decades.

And now, because of the years of work we did that culminated in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we are finally, finally building a new Brent Spence companion bridge.

And we are replacing the 90-year old Western Hills Viaduct, which is crucial to Cincinnati.

Brent Spence is a critical link in the supply chain network, transporting 160,000 cars and trucks and $2 billion in goods every day - that's 3 percent of the country's entire GDP. And it's part of the fabric of the city in Cincinnati, helping to create the vibrancy of one of America's great cities.

But Ohioans know the old Brent Spence is as dated as it is dangerously crowded, and we've heard from Ohioans who are concerned about concrete crumbling on the Western Hills Viaduct.

We are fixing that, and we are seeing new construction across Ohio - and it's not just huge projects like the Brent Spence and the Intel Fabs in Licking County.

We are seeing major upgrades to streets and bridges across Ohio, including Ohio's rural counties and Appalachia. We announced this month that the Market Street Bridge, which connects Steubenville with West Virginia, will finally be replaced.

We are also making critical investments to modernize public transit.

Americans take 21 million trips on transit every day. And when buses and trains and all the infrastructure required to operate them are not up to date, service is slower and less reliable.

Imagine driving the same car every single day for 40 years. That's what operators on Cleveland's RTA have been doing for years.

In Cleveland, I met with workers whose job it is to maintain rail cars that date back to the Reagan Administration. At the rail car garage on the East Side of Cleveland, you actually see these workers machining replacement parts for cars that are so old, that's the only way to get the parts - they don't make them anymore.

But now, finally, because of the Infrastructure law, Cleveland will get 60 new rail cars.

And we all know the U.S. lacks a robust national passenger rail network that other major economic powers have. We are changing that.

We're seeing construction of new facilities to improve transit and rail service, like Akron Metro's new maintenance facility and a new Amtrak station in Bryan, Ohio.

We also know how crucial manufacturing and innovation are to our economy.

Today, modern infrastructure is driven by information technology.

The microchips that power our machines and computers are the product of American design and ingenuity - but we have become dependent on other countries for the production. 90 percent of the chips we invented are now made overseas.

Taiwan is dominant today. Alarmingly, China is trying to become dominant tomorrow.

We wrote the CHIPS and Science Act to change the trajectory.

It's allowing us to build a new generation of chip production factories in Ohio and around the country.

All of these investments are growing our economy and creating jobs and opportunity.

In the past three years, we have added 670,000 construction jobs to the U.S. economy. This is only the start - hiring is expected to pick up even more in the coming years, as more and bigger projects get underway.

And that doesn't even take into account the jobs throughout the manufacturing supply chain, because we made sure these laws have the strongest "Buy America" rules ever.

The steel, iron, pipes and other construction materials used in these projects are being made in Ohio and across the U.S., by American workers - not imported from China.

Whether they're pipefitters or bricklayers or ironworkers or steelworkers - these are good, middle class jobs with high wages and on-the-job training opportunities, where you can develop a craft and build a career.

Few understand that better than one of our witnesses today, Mike Knisley, Secretary and Treasurer of the Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council.

Mike represents the men and women who are doing the real work on these projects. I was at an event last summer with Mike in Columbus - it was a graduation for a training program that places workers directly into union apprenticeships in the Trades. It's creating opportunity for so many people who haven't had a lot of it before.

Every one of those graduates had on T-shirts that said in big letters on the back, "Direct Path to the Middle Class."

That is what the jobs are that we're creating - a direct path to the middle class. This is how you build an economy that upholds the dignity of work.

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