Hire More Heroes Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I rise to speak in favor of the DRIVE Act. I was a supporter of this bill from the first vote we had in the last week. There were some changes made immediately that I thought were important. I think this long-term bill is incredibly important to our country's future. Time and again, we have had these short-term extensions, and that is what the House of Representatives is talking about again.

We have an opportunity here. Americans, as we know, can't fix a road in 2 months. In a State such as Minnesota, where we have two seasons, one road construction season and one winter, citizens cannot plan ahead and our State cannot plan ahead when we continue to have these short-term extensions. They also want to do bigger things and better things for transportation in our State, and this funding and this bill will allow them to do that, instead of this Mickey Mouse short-term extension time after time after time.

As we have heard from my colleagues, ranking member Senator Boxer, our chairman, Senator Inhofe, Senator Durbin, and Senator Whitehouse today, I think it is incredibly important that we move forward with this bill.

This Senator came to this issue in a very tragic way; that is, when a bridge fell down in the middle of a summer day. The anniversary of this bridge collapse is coming up in just a few days. It was a beautiful summer day, rush hour, and there were tons of traffic going over one of the most heavily traveled bridges in our State. This wasn't just a bridge; this was an eight-lane highway. It was something you wouldn't even notice as a bridge because there were so many cars on it. It was the I-35W bridge.

On that day, I was in Washington. I remember trying to call some people in Minnesota. The cell phone services wouldn't work, and I was wondering what was wrong with the cell phone service. What I found about 5 minutes later is that people were calling, panicked about their loved ones because tens of thousands of people were traveling near that bridge that day. In fact, when that bridge collapsed, tragically, 13 people died and dozens of cars were submerged.

Heroes who came to the front that day didn't run away from that bridge. They ran toward it. No one will forget the off-duty firefighter Shanna Hanson, who was going in and out, in and out on a rope tethered to the side of the bridge, trying to get people, trying to find people in the murky water. The fact that 13 people died--tragic as it was--was something of a miracle, given how many people were injured. Over 100 people were injured in the collapse.

A schoolbus sat precariously on the edge of the bridge. A Tasty truckdriver literally veered out so the schoolbus wouldn't go over the edge and ended up tragically dying himself when the truck caught on fire. The schoolbus was labeled the ``miracle bus'' because youth workers on the bus had the presence of mind to take these little kids who were on the bus going out for a summer outing and get them out the back and to safety. That happened. All of that happened on August 1.

As I said that day, a bridge just shouldn't fall down in the middle of America--not an eight-lane highway, not a bridge which is literally 8 blocks from my house and which I drive on every day with my family, with my daughter. That is the bridge that fell down.

So what did we do in Minnesota? In 13 months, we rebuilt that bridge. On a bipartisan basis, just like you see with this bill with the DRIVE Act, we worked together across the aisle. We got the Federal funding, and we rebuilt that bridge, but that is not where the story ends.

Because of what happened, because of the design defect that caused that bridge to fall, in addition to two other issues NHTSA found, which are that there weren't adequate inspections and they also found there were problems with construction guides because there was construction work going on--but the bottom cause was a design defect.

If we had adequate highway funding, adequate inspections, and we were able to go back in and look at bridges, as we did after the fact in Minnesota, and found that others had the same defect and that they had to be replaced--our State put more money into infrastructure, which helped us--I should add for my colleagues in this Chamber that it was one of the major reasons CNBC rated Minnesota as one of the best States to do business in the country, the best State to do business in, followed by Texas, Georgia, and Colorado. Two of the major factors they looked at were the quality of life and infrastructure.

After this collapse occurred, we invested, and that is what this bill is about. It is about making a safer America. As Senator Whitehouse just outlined, our country is getting D's for infrastructure. It is about a safer America. It is about reducing congestion, but it is also about our economy, as shown by what has happened in Minnesota since the bridge collapse. It is about building our economy. When we are building our economy based on exports, we have to have a way to get goods to market. The way you do that is to upgrade railways and upgrade locks and dams, as we did in an earlier bill last year when we updated highways and we updated bridges.

I am very excited about this bill. I love the fact that this leads us to a 21st century transportation system. I love the fact that we were able to get my distracted driving provisions in there, with the help of Senator Thune, Senator Nelson, and I had worked on them with Senator Hoeven.

Distracted driving is a major safety risk in this country that we are finally going to be able to find a way to get the money out to the States so it is not just sitting and piling up and going nowhere, so States can start educating people about distracted driving.

There is the work in the bill on graduated driving that I worked on so hard, on licenses as well as drunk driving. There are a lot of good measures in this bill.

Mostly this bill is about the long term. It is about looking at the long-term economy and looking at the long-term safety issues, instead of just putting on a bandaid every 2 months, every 3 months, every 6 months. This is an opportunity that can't be missed.

I ask my colleagues for their strong support. We have strong support for this as well as the Ex-Im Bank. I ask my colleagues across the way in the House to support this bill, do the right thing, and come up with a long-term solution.

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. I thank the chairman for his work on this bill, for his chairmanship on the committee, and his willingness to work across the aisle on this bill.

I would say this is a major problem. If we do just a short-term extension, then maybe a project gets funded here and there, but we don't do the long-term maintenance, which is never as glamorous as building new projects.

This is about long-term maintenance and work that needs to be done on our existing roads and bridges as well as exciting new opportunities. But when we don't have that kind of clear funding source for our States to see that we have a window, as the Presiding Officer knows with her leadership in the State of Nebraska, you just can't do projects in a State when the funding is not going to be there 3 months later. One is not able to invest in the maintenance and long-term work that needs to be done, and that is why this Senator thanks the chairman and the ranking member, Senator Boxer, for her incredible work on this bill as well because this is about long-term funding for planning, for safety, and also for our economy.

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. I say to Senator Boxer and Senator Inhofe, I think that is why we are here today, to talk about the fact that we have come together across party lines with people from completely different political ideologies to agree that we need a long-term fix to our transportation problem.

As the Senator mentioned the people, I think sometimes people think about transportation as bricks and mortar or something very esoteric, but it is not; it is about the people who use the system. Senator Inhofe talked about the people who died in the bridge collapse in his State. There is a memorial for the 13 people who died in our State. I would suggest, if you ever come to the Twin Cities, come and look at it because it shows--as Senator Inhofe knows--everyone uses the roads and bridges. These people came from vastly different backgrounds. They were young people. There was a man who died. He and his wife had just decided they wanted to have a baby. Of all things, after he died, she decided to adopt children by herself, and she decided to adopt them from Haiti. Then the tragedy happened in Haiti, and we actually helped her get these children home. These are people who worked all kinds of different jobs. Some were coming home from work, some were students, some were moms busy in their car. Those are the people who died. They were America. America uses our bridges and roads and trains. We have to remember this is about the people who work construction, this is about the people who use the roads and bridges, and this is about our economy moving forward.

Sometimes we get so into facts and figures and what one House does and what the other House does that we forget why we are spending money on our bridges and our roads and what this means for our future economy.

I thank the leaders of this bill for what they have done, their willingness to take a lot of heat for working across the aisle, for making sure that what we are using to pay for this bill are things that make sense for our country and continue to allow us to move forward, and also for making changes to the bill when other Members had problems with it. That is why they are gaining so much momentum, and I am sure our friends over in the House are looking at this bill. They have examined the pay-fors--they have now had weeks to do that--and they have also looked at the safety provisions and other things in the bill.

So at some point they are going to have the ability to decide if they are for this bill or against it or, as Senator Boxer mentioned, if they want to make some changes. But the key is that we have a good base bill which has brought people together from across the country, from different ideologies, which they can use and look at. If they just want to do another one of these short-term fixes--it is never going to get us where we need to be so we don't have another one of these bridges collapse on August 1, in the middle of a summer day. That happened in this country in this century. It will happen again if we keep this up.

I yield the floor.

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