Ricketts: States Should “Play a More Active Role in Federal Highway Programming”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts (R-NE), a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, called for states to play a more active role in federal highway programming. Ricketts said the following:

“Transportation infrastructure, we’ve all said it, is incredibly important in my home state in Nebraska, just like it is where you all come from,” Ricketts said. “It’s important for our competitiveness, for our industrial opportunity, and really just our quality of life. And so it’s something that we want to make sure we’re doing to the best job possible. As we’re looking to reauthorize, toward Highway Reauthorization, states need to be playing a more active role in the programming.”

“The Department of Transportation should be doing something where we empower states through the formula funding to be able to let them make the decisions and not cherry-pick different ‘green’ projects that are discretionary grants,” Ricketts said.

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Ricketts made the comments in a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on implementation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. During the hearing, he also questioned the panelists on ways to improve efficiency and service quality through process improvement, similar to Nebraska’s successful process improvement when Ricketts was Governor.