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- [00:04]
Santi Ruiz
Hi, I'm Santi Ruiz and this is Statecraft. You probably know the drill. We interview top political appointees and civil servants about how they achieved a specific policy goal. You can find the transcript for this conversation and many others at www.statecraft.pub. last week, we talked to Stephanie Pollack about salvaging a transit project in danger of failure. It was the first in a set of interviews we're running on transit. Today we're zooming out further and looking at how the federal government funds local transit. I'm pretty excited about the guest we landed. Peter Rogoff spent 22 years as a staffer on the most powerful Senate committee, the Appropriations Committee. He was on the Democratic side, Approps, as it's called, determines discretionary spending for agencies. And for most of his time there, Rogoff was the most senior Dem staffer. Rogoff worked on three transportation reauthorization bills in 1995, 98, and 2005, and those are the bills that determine how much money will be distributed to transit agencies across the country. In 2008, during the Great financial crisis, Rogoff was a key player in introducing the idea of making new funding available to, quote, unquote, multimodal transportation projects, projects that benefit multiple types of transportation. The next transportation reauthorization process is coming up in 2026, and I thought it'd be valuable to better understand how that bill comes together. But Rogoff doesn't just have experience budgeting. The following year, in 2009, Rogoff was appointed as head of the Federal Transit Administration, or fta, where he served for five years. More recently, for six years, he was the CEO of Sound Transit, the Seattle transit agency. I didn't agree with Peter on everything in this conversation, which we recorded in February, but it's hard to find a figure in American life who spent more time thinking about federal transit policy. I hope you enjoy.
- [01:48]
Interviewer
Peter Rogoff, thank you for joining.
- [01:50]
Peter Rogoff
Thanks for having me.
- [01:51]
Interviewer
For a lay audience. What does the Federal Transit Administration do?
- [01:56]
Peter Rogoff
So within the U.S. department of Transportation, there are a number of what we refer to as modal administrations. So there's the Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, which are some of the ones that people know better. The Federal Transit Administration is both the federal funder of and grant maker of transit agencies all across the country, both large and small, and they also regulate the behavior of those transit agencies consistent with federal rules.
- [02:24]
Interviewer
This might be a dumb question, but when I think transit as a layman, I don't think just bus and light rail and subways. But that's what it means in this context, right?
- [02:35]
Peter Rogoff
It does. There is also a Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees freight rail, but also the inner city rail, like the Amtrak system. There's actually a lot of overlap between what the FTA and the FRA does. You're talking about two different grantees that sometimes share the same track. It is principally about buses, bus rapid transit, vans, medical transportation, and obviously the major public rail systems around the country, ranging from the New York City subway system all the way down to small streetcars in several cities around the country.
- [03:15]
Interviewer
And can you give me like a pie chart of the money in the country that goes into transit? So the Federal Transit Administration, the fta, administers grants for cities and states. What chunk is that of the money that gets spent on this stuff?
- [03:31]
Peter Rogoff
Well, the majority of funds are funds that go out by formula annually to each of the transit agencies. And those dollars are very important. They're actually especially important to the smaller transit agenc, smaller rural transit agencies. It's kind of ironic, but when you testify before Congress, you get a feeling out of sometimes Republican members of the House that they just view transit as an urban activity and something that they need and care about in Red America, when in fact the transit agencies in more rural areas and suburban areas are more dependent on federal dollars than the large urban systems. The reality is they're all dependent on federal dollars, but the larger systems get a smaller portion of their total budget from the federal government than the smaller systems that may have 80 to 90% of their costs totally covered by the federal government.
- [04:31]
Interviewer
And in the case of a major urban transit agency, what's the rough percentage?
- [04:37]
Peter Rogoff
Well, this is something I suspect we're going to come back to a lot in this interview. And it's an expression quite used frequently when at the fta. And that is, if you've seen one transit agency, you've seen one transit agency because no two of them are really governed the same way, funded the same way, have the same passenger profile, have the same ways and means of moving people. When you look across like 900 transit agencies in America, it's everything from a five van operation to the entire Long Island Railroad.
- [05:18]
Interviewer
Who's operating five vans?
- [05:21]
Peter Rogoff
Oh, several. There are small transit agencies on Native American tribes that are connecting workers to places of employment. There is a program which is partnered with Medicaid where transit agencies actually Medicaid recipients get a transportation allocation to get to and from medical appointments, and small transit agencies provide that access. There's probably some with fewer than Five.
- [05:50]
Interviewer
Just to give me some color, knowing that no two transit agencies are the same, maybe give me the percentage of federal dollars into, like, the New York transit system or the DC transit system.
- [06:02]
Peter Rogoff
Boy, it's funny that you pick out DC because the Washington Metro system gets a separate $150 million out of a program that is solely theirs because of the federal employees they transport. There is a product that the FTA runs every year. It's called the National Transit Database, or ntd. I would literally have to pull up my NTD data on my screen here to give you the percentages. But this is my point. There isn't a rule of thumb. Some get state appropriations, some don't. So we're wholly dependent on what the city puts up. Some get sales taxes, but not property taxes. Some get property taxes, sales taxes, and motor vehicle excise taxes. Everyone is sort of piecing it together their own way. Locally. The federal formula stipulates, based on a set of criteria, how much they're going to receive, but it's never everything. So they need to piece together their own local system, their own local resources, decide how large and robust a system they want.
- [07:08]
Interviewer
Will you spend a couple minutes and just explain the federal formula for funding?
- [07:14]
Peter Rogoff
It depends on a variety of factors. And then as often happens in federal formula fights and transportation, which I saw over multiple decades, there's the formula that's in the law, and then there's superseding legislation that says, oh, but when there's too much dynamism and someone, because of, for example, a loss of population due to the census, is suddenly going to lose money, then they prohibit losses so people can hold their own. So more and more, the formula distribution sometimes gets out of sync with what the formula in the law says because of subsequent legislation. I've seen that a lot, certainly in the highway program. There's also a requirement for small state minimums in many federal programs in transportation, a state like Rhode island or Alaska is getting way more per mile of highway or way more per number of passengers than a New York or a California. So focusing on the formula and the law isn't always that helpful. I will always remember when I was FTA administrator, I was doing a trip through Cleveland and all the trips I had taken heretofore, not to Cleveland, but around the country. I was able to give a speech touting the fact that the Obama administration budget was going to bring increased federal funds to their local transit agency. When I got to Cleveland, I'm looking through the talking points that the staff prepared for me and didn't find that, which was also, you know, kind of the winning talking point in your speech. I called back to the office and am informed that actually Ohio's numbers are going down, especially Cleveland's numbers are going down, because we were implementing the new census and Cleveland was losing population so fast at the time that notwithstanding an increase in the available federal funds, the actual formula allocation to Cleveland was going to decline. So, you know, you pivot.
- [09:19]
Interviewer
What did you pivot to?
- [09:21]
Peter Rogoff
Talking about the need for them to adequately maintain their existing system. One of the big issues that I talked about a lot, which I think was sort of one of the signature issues from my tenure there, was focusing on what we called the state of good repair of the systems. When I was first confirmed as administrator, I gave a speech that was somewhat controversial, and I didn't even appreciate how controversial it would be at the time. It was a speech at the Federal Reserve bank in Boston. In Boston at the time, the MBTA was really struggling with deteriorating service because of the age of their system. At the same time, they and many other cities had applications before the FTA for federal funds to expand their system. And I focused in this speech over whether it was really appropriate as a matter of policy for us to send more taxpayer dollars to transit agencies to expand their system when they weren't adequately maintaining the system that we had already built them. And boy, alarm bells went off all over the place because that was a little blasphemous for some folks to say that they were gonna be held accountable for how well they were maintaining the system we already built. And it was something I focused on a lot in my tenure there. And thankfully, Congress actually, as a result of this drumbeat, authorized a whole new category of grants specifically for maintenance of major systems like that.
- [10:52]
Interviewer
It's interesting. I was prepping for this interview and I saw a lot of the pushback to that speech that you gave in Boston. I've got a quote from you here that I'll just read. You said in, I guess this was 2010. Supporters of public transit must be willing to share some simple truths that folks don't want to hear. One is this paint is cheap. Rail systems are extremely expensive. And you go on to say that you can entice die hard rail riders onto a bus if you call it a special bus and paint it a different color than the rest of the fleet. And once you've got special buses, it turns out the busways are cheap. What was the feedback you got to that line of argument?
- [11:30]
Peter Rogoff
There is a mindset in transit and that is that trains are inherently better than buses. But at that time especially there was an increasing use of what's called bus rapid transit, sometimes referred to as trains on wheels and BRT systems. There are some really very good ones that really do mimic train operations. And quite frankly there are sadly some really dumbed down ones that call themselves BRT but is really just express bus service in mixed use traffic. But the really good ones have their own designated lanes. In fact, the really good ones have lanes where there is no encroachment from automotive traffic into the lane at all. They are truly separated lanes. They are their own busway. So one of the projects that we did was Hartford to New Britain, a busway that really was its own roadway solely for buses. And when I said paint was cheap, often those bus only lanes are painted red. And you know, the reality then, and I believe it is still true now, is that the majority of transit trips in America is still taken by bus. And you know, I signed a historic for the time number of grant agreements for rail expansion. I just thought it was important that we asked this question. I remember when the folks from Muni in San Francisco were coming in for expansion money, I required them to go back and do a review of what it was really going to cost them to adequately maintain their system. And part of the problem wasn't just a lack of funding for maintenance. Part of it was not being very sophisticated and smart in how they were maintaining the system. So when you go back into a really comprehensive look, you will find that transit agencies have had certain practices that have been going on for decades where certain components were replaced every three years even though they could last seven years. And other components were being replaced every seven years, but broke down every three. And just getting more sophisticated and precise from a total cost of ownership perspective was just a practice that we look at that seems like a no brainer today. But transit agencies were slow to get there.
- [13:57]
Interviewer
There's so many things I want to ask you here, but one is just this kind of broad question. Some of these transit agencies are very big, they're well staffed, they've got lots of resources. How is it that they need someone like you, like the FTA administrator to push them on that stuff? Why aren't they self correcting?
- [14:16]
Peter Rogoff
Well, I think the ones with really good leadership are. But this dates from a time well before the Six Sigma revolution and people really looking at the entirety of their operations and launching into an effort on continuous improvement. There's a mindset in certain transit agencies that we've always done it this way. Why would we change? I recently did a major assessment of the rail car procurement processes of a major large and long standing rail transit agency in America. And there were a lot of eye opening conclusions about practices that they've been using to purchase rail cars that are serving them very poorly in the current day, especially in a changed marketplace. But you know, they've been doing it that way for that long and they weren't really about ready to change. And they're even, even now is internal resistance to some of our recommendations. But that's just the inertia of entities, period. And then when you get into old line public agencies, maybe there's even more inertia.
- [15:24]
Interviewer
Do transit agencies have a natural default to want to expand rather than to do more maintenance? Is that like a common situation that you encountered?
- [15:34]
Peter Rogoff
There's no question that there's a political momentum that is far stronger behind expansion than maintenance. Right. So transit boards are coffin populated by local elected officials. When I ran Sound Transit in Seattle, I had a governing board of 18 local elected officials. That's particularly large, but you know, others are smaller. And all of those elected officials represent jurisdictions that want new rail service yesterday. And in many cases they put their political capital on the line to go out to the voters to get them to adopt tax increases to provide those rail systems, those expansions. And there's plenty of opportunities for groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings for expanded rail service and whole new stations that in a community that hasn't heretofore been served, it's harder to get collected officials to celebrate a replacement of a subsystem. That subsystem needed to be replaced and badly. But it's just like water and sewer. It's a service that people take for granted. And often they don't see it. They don't see it until the inadequate maintenance translates into deteriorated service and unreliable service. And then they see it in a big and bad way, which then sours people on using transit. So this is part of the reason why people really need to stay on top of maintenance because they're going to lose ridership if they're not reliable. And reliability has everything to do with how well they've maintained the system.
- [17:18]
Interviewer
Was it part of your role as FTA administrator to make that argument to local transit agencies?
- [17:25]
Peter Rogoff
I think transit agencies knew it. We just needed to say it out loud, you know, and get people thinking about, you know, just as I did with Muni in San Francisco, we did eventually allocate a large chunk of federal dollars to expand their system. But we also, I think in the process got them a lot smarter and a lot more highly sensitized. They didn't want to come in and have meetings with me about their next expansion grant without talking about what they were doing on State of Good Repair. And that was kind of an ethic I was trying to generate with transit agencies all over the country.
- [18:00]
Interviewer
Will you say just a little bit more about the federal formulas you mentioned? Population growth or decline is obviously an input. What else goes into that formula?
- [18:10]
Peter Rogoff
Population, ridership. And then there's formula factors that have to do with how old you are. That may not necessarily follow a lot of logic, but older systems have more infrastructure and older infrastructure to maintain. So there is one program that actually divides up the dollars where systems that are older than a certain date are eligible for the first tranche, then slightly newer systems can participate in the second tranche, and yet third systems are in another tranche. That is not the predominant factors that govern formula allocations, but it's principally about ridership. How large a system you are. And there are tiers, and the tiers depend on how many riders you carry in a year.
- [19:01]
Interviewer
One of the things my colleagues on the IFP infrastructure team was very excited to ask you was about TIGER grants, which were a set of grants that you helped negotiate and you helped write the language for in your time as a professional staff member in the Senate, which deviated from the that kind of classic formula system. I'd love if you could explain how the TIGER grants came, to be sure.
- [19:26]
Peter Rogoff
Well, it's funny in that TIGER grants are viewed as one of a number of programs where non highway projects can command large chunks of surface transportation money for the federal government. It's ironic that the idea for developing the TIGER program stemmed from a meeting I had with two highway commissioners. Let's place this in context. This is just when the Obama administration was coming into office. The economy was the biggest recession since the Depression. People were being laid off right and left, especially those that were dependent on tax revenues to generate employment. And I met with Kirk Steidl, who at the time was the highway commissioner for the state of Michigan, and Butch Brown, who was one of the highway commissioners in Mississippi. It's divided into three sectors there. And they were explaining to me that they had projects that were ready to be built. All of the environmental work had been done, it'd been put out for bid, they had qualified bids, but they were canceling the procurement because of the loss of revenues, because of the recession and Given the thrust of the Recovery act, we were charged with coming up with ways of getting people back to work. I presented to Senator Murray, who was then the subcommittee chair of the Transportation Subcommittee, this concept that we should just put out. We were going to have an allocation of transportation dollars, but rather than have it just go out by the usual formulas that we should be able to have a big chunk of dollars that was very focused on some of these big projects, very noteworthy projects, and in many states, cases, game changing projects to get them off the cutting room floor and back into motion. We had a good bit of resistance from some of the entrenched folks. The Environment and Public Works Committee, which thinks that everything should have gone out by highway formulas, resisted us. Eventually they didn't carry the day.
- [21:45]
Interviewer
Can I have you back up for a second? I think some readers or listeners won't be familiar with the different committees and the way they can act rivalrously towards each other.
- [21:55]
Peter Rogoff
Yeah, so this is one of these situations where jurisdiction between committees gets murky. The Appropriations Committee was charged with putting together the Recovery act, principally through a series of appropriations on two already established programs. Those programs are authorized by other committees. So in the case of surface transportation in the Senate, the Environment and Public Works Committee authorizes highway programs. The Banking Committee, interestingly enough, handles transit programs. And the Commerce Committee handles rail programs, meaning inner city rail and Amtrak type programs. And you would think, as they did in the House, the House also had balkanized jurisdictions for different modes and different committees, but they actually reformed that many years ago.
- [22:48]
Interviewer
So in the House side, all transit gets authorized by the same committee.
- [22:52]
Peter Rogoff
So all of those things I mentioned, highways, transit, pin rail, are all authorized by what's now called the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the House. In the Senate, it's divided across three committees. And sometimes that results in kind of elbow throwing and joffying for position between committees. In this case, the Appropriations Committee was charged with developing the transportation portion of the Recovery Act. And we did, for the most part, put just appropriations into, you know, in programs to get dollars out the door. But the Tiger program was an innovation. It didn't follow the norms and got some people disgruntled.
- [23:32]
Interviewer
Can you explain what was the innovation there?
- [23:35]
Peter Rogoff
Well, that it was going to be a large discretionary grant program. It wasn't going to be, you know, peanut buttered all across the country in formula grants. And that was the thinking that if you just put it out by formula, everyone would get a little bit of money and it wouldn't be enough to get these big projects back up off the cutting room floor. But if you had a discretionary grant program where the Secretary could make selections based on how notable and important these projects were, especially to a national transportation system, then bigger grants could go out. So we originally got a fair degree of resistance from the then senior Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Barbara Boxer of California. I always used to gig her a little bit about that because then she would come and lobby for TIGER grants and celebrate TIGER grants as she should. Right. The program morphed from where it originally started, and there's always going to be jurisdictional tussles between committees. But what started as a conversation about highway projects actually morphed into how we could do some major investments in some more intermodal projects. And for the first few years of the TIGER program, it was a good opportunity to fund things like streetcar projects that many of the mayors wanted. The FTA would end up administering those grants, but they were allocated by the Secretary's office with my input. And similarly, bike and pedestrian projects where you can make a fairly small grant, but this kind of thing that cities and counties kind of never got around to doing also was qualified for that. Another big digression that ruffled some feathers at the beginning is we did not put these dollars out by the so called 8020 formula. There's a dogma in transportation policy, land that held on for years, that whatever amounts of dollars were allocated should go 80% to highways and 20% to transit. And its origins were in the fact that 20% of highway trust Fund revenues were deposited in the mass transit account of the highway trust fund. But 80% were put into the highway account of the Highway Trust Fund. The Highway Trust Fund has been underwater to the tune of billions and really well over now. The number's probably far higher. Last I checked, the Highway Trust Fund has had to lift at least $170 billion over the last three or four reauthorizations just to stay afloat. So the relevance of the revenues, if it's at all relevant, it's minuscule because this program is to a very large degree surviving on general fund bailouts every few years.
- [26:23]
Interviewer
Will you just explain the multimodal piece of tiger?
- [26:27]
Peter Rogoff
Well, I mean, it's really not, if you will, a multimodal fund. What really it comes down to is that TIGER can be, can go to most any mode. It can even go to port projects. That was a big innovative part. It could go to some freight rail improvements, which was also controversial at the time because freight rail infrastructure is privately owned. It's either owned by one of the major Class 1 railroads or it's owned by short line railroads. But to put public dollars into privately owned infrastructure was like a big bright line when I first started, you know, in transportation 1989. But was something that we pierced through. It was especially needed for port projects because port projects really didn't have a good place to go. And if you really look at what's going on internationally in terms of the competitiveness of our ports, it's a real problem. We were bleeding a lot of traffic to ports like Prince Rupert in Vancouver and in British Columbia, Halifax on the east coast instead of having them come to the Port of New York and New Jersey. And we just needed to improve our competitiveness there.
- [27:49]
Interviewer
Sure. So TIGER grants were mode neutral. They could go to any kind of transportation mode. And I'm reading here they were merit based. You used cost benefit analysis as part of the application evaluation process. Tell me a little bit more about that. Because you were also thinking big picture about the national transportation system and where these dollars could be best allocated to keep big projects alive. Right?
- [28:14]
Peter Rogoff
Well, like I said, it morphed over time. So the dollars were appropriated. If you look at the first round of TIGER I, there were some very large allocations. There was about one and a half billion dollars. In the subsequent years the program survived but like at a third of its size to like half a billion dollars and sort of stayed at that level. And then as a result of the infrastructure bill got far larger. I think the name of the program now has also changed two times. And I think the authorizing committees finally went in and actually authorized the rules for the program. Back when we were dealing with the Recovery act, it was wide open and the Secretary's office was charged with developing a criteria that would apply to all applicants. I will tell you, during my time there, there was no notion of a set amount that would go to highway projects versus transit projects versus freight bale projects versus port projects. It was really merit based on what came in the door and what justified itself. Well, congressional inputs mattered. We wanted to know what were important to congressional delegations that were putting up this money every year. And a lot of really good projects got started. One of the things that we thought was an innovation that we developed after the program that really wasn't in the law, but was something that we worked on in the Obama administration was what we called TIGER Challenge grants. So there were people who were working on some very important projects, but they weren't the shovel ready projects that President Obama was looking for in the recovery act. But they needed additional money to get through planning and design. And we would provide challenge grants, which was basically a here's some money to keep you moving forward, much smaller amounts, and please come back when you're ready and apply for a full fledged tiger grant. And I think a number of the projects that did get challenged grants eventually did get full blown tiger grants.
- [30:17]
Interviewer
Will you help me just understand how you could compare such different kinds of transportation infrastructure projects on merit? I mean, how do you compare the merits of a good bike path program to a highway expansion, for instance?
- [30:32]
Peter Rogoff
No, it's a very good question and it's not easy. What we did was develop, and I don't have it memorized in my head, but there were certain factors that we did score them on. It wasn't a hard numerical score because that would just give rise to false precision. You know, it's not like, oh, this project gets an 84 for sustainability, but the other one gets a 76. I mean, it just doesn't work that way. But we did rack and stack them in projects that eventually, through those criteria, would give rise to highly recommended projects, recommended projects and not recommended projects. And the not recommended projects weren't because they weren't good projects. They were generally not ready or if you will, not fully baked. But, you know, a lot of it had to do with readiness. Confidence in the grantee. That's a real issue. You know, I'll be honest. One area where we had, I think, excessive confidence and it proved to be so as the program rolled out was there was really strong interest in a number of cities, principally by their mayors, to bring streetcars back to their downtown landscape. Now, streetcars are not a very good transportation mode. They are a economic development project.
- [31:53]
Interviewer
What do you mean by that term, by an economic development project?
- [31:57]
Peter Rogoff
It is something that usually where you build a streetcar, there will be considerable improvement in the housing and retail that surround becomes kind of a destination for going back downtown for dining out and entertainment, as opposed to a very quick way to get people from one end of the city to the other because it's not quick. And a number of mayors were interested in it. Secretary LaFood was interested in helping them. And we funded quite a number of them. Cincinnati, Dallas, New Orleans. Well, New Orleans had streetcars for a considerable period of time. Seattle. And in many cases the grantee, the applicant for the TIGRA application was the city transportation department. Well, that was, in retrospect, a mistake. Many of those projects had to be taken over by the local transit agency. Even though they didn't necessarily apply for them or weren't part of the birthing of the project because they were the ones who had the planning department, they were the ones who had some experience in rail construction. I think a lot of city departments just thought they were going to lay some tracks on top of the existing street and be done with it and run a train up and down. It didn't really think about like the traction power, you know, power supply system on what's going to move that train. So that was sort of a very difficult birthing that played itself out. I remember having a very difficult conversation with the then mayor of Cincinnati about the fact that he had already led a contract to build his streetcar that had zero federal assurances in it. So we couldn't send him a check anyway because it was a completely non compliant contract. But that's the kind of thing that happened, right, that we just needed to fix over time.
- [33:47]
Interviewer
Looking back, obviously hindsight's 20 20, but what would have prevented the Department of Transportation from making that mistake?
- [33:55]
Peter Rogoff
That one could have been easily handled if we'd funneled the money directly through, through the Federal Transit Administration. Rather than have the Secretary's office make grants and then presume that the grantee was sophisticated on how to access the dollars, the Federal Transit Administration would eventually administer these grants. That's how Tiger works. After the awards are made, the projects are farmed out to the modal administration that most appropriately should oversee it.
- [34:24]
Interviewer
But it starts in the Secretary's office and only later just goes down to some sub.
- [34:29]
Peter Rogoff
Correct. And in retrosp, we probably should have let the fta, I mean, we were invited to provide comments on different grantees. But you have to remember, boy, in those first two years with the Recovery act, it was about getting grants out the door to get people back to work. I mean that was the imperative and that was made clear. Boy, I remember a great tool that I have subsequently used in other parts of my career. Secretary Rahud had a meeting of all of the modal administrators on Thursday morning. And every Thursday morning we reported about what progress we were making on getting Recovery act dollars out the door. And there was one woman I remember, who put together the PowerPoint slides on each agency's progress on Wednesday night. And all of us were desperate to get our most up to date data into Lana Hurdle is her name. She's retired now on Wednesday night. So we could show Secretary LaHood on Thursday morning that progress had been made from the prior week. It was a very effective tool to keep People working. I mean, a ton of work got done on Tuesdays and Wednesdays because everyone knew Thursday was going to come around again. And I used that tool when I was an agency head in Seattle as well.
- [35:43]
Interviewer
That's great. I want to get into your time at the fta, but first, can we just talk a little bit about your time as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee staff? As you mentioned, you had a key role in writing the TIGER grant legislation. And one source I'm looking at says that you helped, quote, build support for this approach within the Senate. I'd love to hear about that.
- [36:06]
Peter Rogoff
Well, it was, like I said, it kicked off with a jurisdictional fight, but it's just like in any other role in advocating for. For legislation, you have to build a coalition. You have to educate folks who might have an interest in it, that they do, in fact, have an interest in it. So thinking back, and I could think of other things I did in the Senate where this was all the more true. But in the case of the TIGER program, you had maritime interests and senators that had maritime interests, that because ports didn't really have an eligible grant program of any size, kind of get on the phone and remind folks that, yeah, you're going to get a letter from Senator Boxer says that this is an inappropriate way to distribute the money. But let me remind you that this is an avenue for you to finally get the money that you've been looking for for years. And we did not follow the 8020 split. And I reminded folks who had interest in rail and transit projects that this was an important digression that should stay on the books. And those same states I talked about, Kirk Steidel from Michigan and Bush Brown from Mississippi. You went back to the Mississippi senators. I worked for the Democrats. It didn't matter. We all worked much more collaboratively back then, as well as the senators from Michigan, to remind them that the origins of this idea came from their own highway commissioners. So it's just a matter of working the process, but that's inevitably part of what you do. I mean, it's particularly important. I had the privilege of working for the Appropriations Committee, and the appropriations bills had to pass every year to keep the government running. So I didn't always have the burden of just trying to convince people that this bill should have a hearing and should actually get on the floor and should get floor time and should pass. Most staff have that burden to even.
- [38:02]
Interviewer
Get the bill into consideration in the first place.
- [38:04]
Peter Rogoff
Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, you know, especially in my early years, and I was there for 22 years. I just scratched my head about these folks who would work their entire life on one piece of legislation that just like never got anywhere. At least the appropriations bills had to pass, which meant that things that didn't always naturally belong on the appropriations bill ended up on them because it had to pass. So just to give you a flavor, one thing I worked on a great deal with Senator Lautenberg when he was subcommittee chairman was lowering the blood alcohol content nationally to a standard of 0.08.
- [38:45]
Interviewer
That was done as an amendment established drunk driving.
- [38:47]
Peter Rogoff
Yeah, the drunk driving threshold nationally, that was done as an amendment to the Transportation Appropriations Bill, even though there's no.
- [38:55]
Interviewer
Appropriation involved per se.
- [38:58]
Peter Rogoff
Well, the mechanism would have been to sanction states that didn't do it in the early years. That's how they did the minimum drinking age. So you could. We had a hook. But what we really had, more importantly was a ranking member in the form of Senator Lautenberg, who was instrumental in getting the minimum drinking age changed and then was adamant about lowering the blood alcohol content to something more reasonable. And we also had a House transportation subcommittee chairman in a Republican, Frank Wolf, who wanted to do the same thing. So it shows how bipartisanship worked far better back then. Senator Lautenberg, Chairman Wolf had number of meetings and we got to the conference between the House and Senate and we were fought vociferously by the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee in the House, Dave Obie, because he was from Wisconsin, where people did not want the lower blood alcohol content. And they brew a lot of beer.
- [39:56]
Interviewer
And they drink a lot of beer.
- [39:58]
Peter Rogoff
So you really had like what we'll call the saloon lobby and the beer brewers against Mothers Against Drunk Driving all playing itself out in this, you know, one conference room with just a couple of dozen people in it. But it carried the day and became law. The prohibition on smoking on airlines was done as an amendment to the Transportation Appropriations Bill.
- [40:20]
Interviewer
When was that?
- [40:21]
Peter Rogoff
That was before my time. So I think it was in the 80s. One thing that did happen when I was there, the whole federal requirement and regime to test transportation workers for drug and alcohol after accidents and have them be uniformly tested for drugs. That was done as an amendment to the Transportation Appropriations Bill. So with these kind of became a magnet for things, we have a whole new regime that I worked on a great deal on establishing rules that could allow trucks to cross the Mexican border back and forth. After President Clinton signed NAFTA and it called for open cross border trucking between Mexico and the United States. But there were huge safety challenges with that at the time. The whole regime on how that would go forward was crafted on the Transportation Appropriations bill.
- [41:11]
Interviewer
So does that mean you, as a professional staff member on that committee, had to become a lay expert very quickly on a bunch of these topics?
- [41:20]
Peter Rogoff
Yeah. And that was perhaps the most rewarding thing about working on the Transportation Appropriation subcommittee was the fact that you never knew what issue was going to spike up and be front and center the following year. Which is one of the reasons I stayed for 22 years, is it was always different. It was the same job, but it was always different. But also, understand we had a lot of resources, the Appropriations Committee, because they established the funding levels for every program in the discretionary budget, including the staffing levels. And all the departments, when we called, people picked up the phone and helped us and gave us data information on fast turnarounds. That was an important part of what we did, is gather inputs not just from outside experts, but obviously the folks within the departments to help inform our judgment.
- [42:17]
Interviewer
What don't most people understand about getting transit appropriations negotiated? What's counterintuitive about it?
- [42:25]
Peter Rogoff
Well, I think I mentioned one before, and that is that a lot of folks view transit as only an urban endeavor. I mentioned how transit is actually authorized by the Banking Committee in the Senate. That's because the full name of the Banking Committee is Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Transit was considered in its birthing as a federal program in the mid-60s as an urban affair. Actually, the antecedent of federal funding for transit was actually handled in HUD before this Department of Transportation was stood up. But the reality is there are a number of important transit operators that are providing really critical trips, especially to medical facilities and VA hospitals for veterans. And they're entirely dependent on continued federal funding. And often, like I said, their federal funding could be 80% federal. A lot of people probably think the major urban systems are where the highest percentage of federal dollars are as a percentage of their budget, but it's actually the reverse. So that's a little counterintuitive. And the other, I think, is. And you know, for good or ill, how very different every transit agency's profile is in terms of how they're funded, how they're governed, what service they put out. There's a base of federal dollars, but it's really up to local government and local taxation regimes to decide how big the system can be and how well the population is going to be served. I mean, we learned an important lesson during COVID and that was While transit agency ridership dropped off considerably, the people who were still riding it really needed to, and that included all the people that were still going to work at hospitals, going to work at airports that were still open, and that there is a base of what we call the transit dependent population that really can't do without this service. And we discovered more about who they are and how essential transit is when everything else shut down.
- [44:36]
Interviewer
Sure. You were a staffer on the Appropriations Committee during the initial negotiations in 2008, and then when the big stimulus bill passed in early 2009. After that you were appointed to the FTA, you went from helping negotiate the FTA's funding to helping run FTA. What was your plan of action going in?
- [44:55]
Peter Rogoff
Well, Secretary LaHood's plan of action mattered more than any idea that I had in my head, and that was coming right down from the president, and that is to get the dollars put to work quickly. And we did, and were able to obligate grants in a heretofore unprecedented rate, which was critically important to a number of transit agencies that were watching their revenues dry up very quickly and understand that some of them, you know, have direct revenues where they directly get a portion of a sales tax or a portion of property tax, But a great many of them are dependent on annual appropriations from their city council or county council or from the legislature. And those entities, we're also seeing their revenues dry up, not just for transit, but for everything else, for law enforcement, for firefighting, for basic services. So they were making really hard choices. And I'd like to think that the Recovery act made their choices as it related to transit easier because we were getting more money in the hands of the transit agencies quickly. Because this wasn't like Covid, where ridership was dropping off. It was dropping off a little bit because of lower employment, but they still needed to provide the service. And, you know, one of the worst things that can happen in public transit is if when you decrease the frequency of the service so much that it becomes unreliable and people just start looking at other options.
- [46:23]
Interviewer
Right. Over the last four years especially, there's been a whole bunch of public debate about the speed of getting money out the door, obviously with a lot of the Biden infrastructure dollars. So topics like environmental reviews or grant processing or state agency planning have become topics of public debate. I'm curious how you saw that debate coming from a role where your job was to try and move money through bureaucracies quicker, or what lessons did you take from that experience that you would have applied over the last four years?
- [46:58]
Peter Rogoff
Well, I sort of observed this debate from multiple different angles. So I did from the perspective of the Federal Transit Administration, where I was very frustrated that a thing called the environmental process was slowing the deployment of projects that were inherently environmentally beneficial.
- [47:20]
Interviewer
And you saw this back 15 years ago.
- [47:23]
Peter Rogoff
Yeah, I mean, it's still true today. But I think what a lot of people miss or don't understand, who don't, you know, aren't what we call NEPA geeks, is that the environmental process is more than just the environment as defined by clean air and clean water. It's about how you engage a community and tell a community that you're going to change it and make sure that what changes you make, if necessary, can and will be mitigated. Unfortunately, it has become a process that lends itself to litigation. And the litigants are not necessarily environmentalists. They're people who just want to extract something from the project or the project's budget that they feel like the best way to do it is to attack the environmental process. I had experience that with property owners who just felt that, okay, the transit agency and I experienced this both at the FTA but also in Seattle. The transit agency is required to give me fair market value for the property that they are procuring for their project. But I just don't think it's enough. I want them to give me more money. So I'm going to slow things down by going to court and find that they didn't do an adequate study of the impact on certain bird species. The property owner does not give one wit for the bird species, but he or she just wants to slow the process down to see if they can extract a better deal. You know, when I was at the Obama administration as undersecretary, we actually put forward a full blown reauthorization bill. And we did it kind of in the old school way where the administration submits an entire bill formally to Congress. And it took many months to get off the ground. But we also surprised a lot of people that we transmitted an entire bill and not just let Congress have the only say on it. We in the very first title of that bill had an environmental streamlining provision of it. And we surprised some people that the Obama administration itself was coming forward with environmental streamlining. And not every one of those provisions was adopted by Congress. Some of them encountered opposition. But I think there's a pretty broad bipartisan understanding that the process is far from ideal. The challenge is getting some kind of consensus on how to fix it. That isn't really partisan or isn't unraveling important protections?
- [50:01]
Interviewer
Sure. Did you have any tools at your disposal as FTA administrator to speed that process along or I guess, how much were your hands tied by lack of legislative action? What could you do in House?
- [50:16]
Peter Rogoff
Well, it's a matter of which way, whether you're leaning in or leaning back. So a very important fact that a lot of people forget is while these environmental documents, the environmental impact statements are such, are actually produced by and large at the grantee's cost and handled by the grantee, it's actually a federal document that's signed by the federal agency. So it's like every other legal issue is you need to be advised by the lawyers on what risk you were taking by leaning in and saying this environmental document is adequate. I'll be honest. Environmental concerns are very different. FTA has 10 different regions. I will tell you that the environmental concern, focus and strictures of an environmental document coming out of the Pacific Northwest as it relates to fish, certainly as it relates to Native American properties, is very different than it is in Region four in the Southeast.
- [51:23]
Interviewer
Region four for our listeners as well.
- [51:26]
Peter Rogoff
Region four happens to be based out of Atlanta, but happens to handle the southeastern United States versus the northwestern United States. And you also need to make sure that there's consistency. I mean, one thing that the FTA has moved forward on in recent years is actually trying to get more consistency in terms of the quality and diligence of these documents so that they pass muster but can happen more quickly in all 10 regions rather than have 10 regional administrators develop their own. You know, there are unique and local conditions that need to pay attention to. But, you know, can things move more quickly in certain places? Absolutely. The thing that always struck us is how much more detailed it was felt that transit environmental documents needed to be than for highway projects. The Federal Highway Administration just had a very different set of strictures and comfort levels than the Federal Transit Administration.
- [52:20]
Interviewer
Where does that come from?
- [52:22]
Peter Rogoff
I think it comes from the fact that when its program started going back to Eisenhower and the Interstate program, there were no breaks. And they could just say this is where we're going to build and we're going and did and tore apart a number of communities as a result, often communities of color. And there's a lot of lessons that have been learned about that period that aren't particularly pretty. But back when we were talking about the Bureau of Roads, they just plow ahead and start building the Interstate because that was the directive and NEPA that wouldn't Come for many years later, but there are still state dots and highway departments that have greater. This was also true in the state of Washington. Let's put it this way, they have more cards in their hand when going through this process than a transit agency does. Like what their ability to just condemn property and not have to go through as voluminous a process to do so. I and this is not, this is certainly not an insult to the current highway secretary or the transportation secretary in the state of Washington, but we at Sound Transit are proposing to build light rail through the Puyallup Reservation in Pierce county in Washington state to get from Seattle all the way down to Chacoa. And I met with the tribal leaders and one of the things I explained to them to their great comfort was, however we're going to handle this, it will be better than the Washington Department of Transportation did when they ran a highway through their property because that just left people in a very, very bad taste in their mouth. Going back to highway secretaries years ago. So you know, you're talking about a. Especially when it comes to interstates. People used to talk about this and I didn't think it was very important. And the more I've been in the industry, the more I've come to appreciate the historical significance of it. And that is the origins of the highway program and the aviation program are born out of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. Whereas the transit program, because they are very rarely there, there are interstate transit systems, but because they are largely localized, is born out of the public welfare clause of the Constitution and all of the case law that has evolved from that has what resulted in the different lay down that we're experiencing today.
- [54:55]
Interviewer
When you talk about building consensus for these different projects, I'm curious if you have any lessons for us as somebody who spent several decades as a negotiator in the Senate and then more time since trying to build consensus. Often when NEPA geeks, as you put it, talk about consensus, the consensus is consensus is overrated. That consensus is another word for everybody getting their pound of flesh. I'm curious what you make of that.
- [55:24]
Peter Rogoff
No. And this is one of the things that I learned most starkly when I moved from being a policymaker and federal funder to actually running an agency that needed to get permits to build transit expansions through cities. So to give you a flavor, the Sound Transit taxing district. You know, people sometimes refer to it as the Seattle Transit Agency, but In fact it's three counties large and incorporates 52 separate cities. And when you're building major infrastructure through some of those cities. It's the largest thing that's ever come to them. And it is, it can be a. Depending on how you handle it, it can be a very cooperative process or it could be an incredibly painful and lengthy process with cities suing the transit agency and the transit agency suing the city. And I certainly went through a fair bit of that in some cases and also had some very cooperative experiences in others. But yes, if you're in an environment where your elected officials just want to make everybody happy, you're really at a disadvantage because there are hard choices that need to be made when you're building light rail through a city. You know, we have a real challenge in Washington state and that is that we don't have a state income tax. And as a result, municipalities can only raise property taxes, which are also the growth of which is capped at the state level and sales taxes, and then you pay fees for everything else that isn't nailed down. What it also results in is cities and counties being underfunded. And therefore, when a transit agency with a multi billion dollar budget is coming through a city the size of Montlake Terrace, that city council is going to have visions of, well, if they've got so many billion, surely they can help fix this along the way. Our legal obligation is to return the property after we build the light rail system to the condition it was in when we arrived. But for the most part, every city, when you say we're going to build through here, has a vision of what they've wanted to do with their local streets and sidewalks and think that that should be happening on the transit agencies. Done. Not all of that is bad. You know, you want, when you introduce a station to a new community, you want that to be a vibrant station that has good access and ideally has the opportunity to build some affordable housing adjacent to it. And we have a whole program to try to help make that happen, both at the federal level and at Sound Transit. But you know, some of these interfaces with local cities, especially when you need to get a local permit to build through them, can start resembling extortion. I know that's a harsh word to use. I said start resembling. I didn't say it was extortion. But boy, I mean, they know what they want and they will sit across the table and stare at you for a really long time until they can get it. And then sometimes you need to go to the mat and fight them and tell them they're not going to get it. We did that before I arrived at Sound Transit with the city of Tukwila, and I was in litigation with the city of Mercer island for almost my entire time while I was at Sound Transit. And in the end, we won. And the Mercer island taxpayers paid a ridiculous amount of legal fees just to lose. But that's what the posture that the city council is taking.
- [58:50]
Interviewer
What was the fight over in that particular case?
- [58:52]
Peter Rogoff
Mercer island is a very prosperous suburb of Seattle right over the water, who've always thought that they should be getting more than everybody else because they somehow deserve more than everybody else. There was a bitter battle that somehow single occupancy vehicles from Mercer island, even though there was nothing in law that allowed it, were allowed to use the HOV lane to go into the city of Seattle. We had to take away that opportunity. Like I said, it wasn't based in law regulation anyway. But we rebuilt the HOV lanes in order to provide light rail down the middle of the i90 bridge. A lot of the ire related to taking away their HOV access and people complaining that, well, when I bought this house, we were promised that we'd be able to use the HOV lane even as a single occupancy car. It's like, I'm sorry, someone, some realtor promised you that, but it doesn't exist anywhere. They then also felt that they wanted dollars to reconfigure their street grid because we were going to have, you know, all of our modeling showed that there would not be major traffic impacts. They found some modeler to say they were. They wanted tens of millions of dollars for that and we just weren't going there. I mean, in a way, their asks were so outrageous as to ensure that we would just end up in court. Other cities were much more reasonable in their asks, and we found a way to help accommodate them.
- [60:24]
Interviewer
Sure. Let me switch gears a little bit. I'm curious if the FTA is granting money to a local transit agency for a project and that project is delayed and going over budget, but you've already given out the money, what can the FTA do to help curtail project bloat, or is the answer there's very little. Once you've committed the money, it's over.
- [60:47]
Peter Rogoff
Well, I think in fairness, there was a time when I would have focused my answer to your question on whether the FTA is adequately monitoring the technical sophistication of the agency. And that is an important finding, that if you're going to give them what's called a major capital investment grant, you need to find Them technically capable of managing the project. The reality is, in recent times, and I've done a number of talks on this to various governing boards and to, you know, public transit association meetings, we really are in a period of hyperinflation in major infrastructure projects. And the fact that project costs are growing so rapidly across the country, not just in transit, but also in highways and airports and vertical construction for, you know, high rise buildings and commercial real estate. This is really burdening everybody. So I don't take the cost growth that we're seeing in all these projects right now as an indication of incompetence on anyone's part. That's not to say there isn't incompetence out there, but that's not the driving factor here. These are not necessarily isolated incidents. They really are happening all over the place. Part of what I've been doing as a consultant these days is getting governing boards to understand that as upsetting as their local project cost growth is, here's what's happening in Chicago and here's what's happening in New York, and here's what's happening in Miami, St. Louis, on and on and on. What the FTA can do about it is that whole issue of tangled capacity they can avoid as the mistake that I cited before with streetcars, of giving grants to entities that weren't prepared to really, you know, build the project and didn't have that capacity. But as far as, you know, is there a magic bullet that will. Suddenly everyone will come in on time and on budget. You know, you can't, you can't minimize some of these local impacts. Give you an example. One of our Sound Transit projects that were under development, it has become possible, not yet confirmed, that the alignment may abut a Native American burial ground adjacent to one of the boarding schools that Native American children were ripped from their families and sent to. We are not going to disrupt that ground. So a redesign may be necessary. You know, these are the kinds of things that happen when you're in the ground. I had one example in Tacoma where we extended sort of a streetcar like light rail that was very short and not very useful into something much more useful and reaching a nearby community. And when we ripped up the streets, the utilities were nowhere near where they were mapped to be. That resulted in a delay and a redesign of the project. I actually work as an advisor now to a company that has a technology to alleviate and avoid that. And I'm involved with them precisely because of how badly burned I was in that particular project. No kidding. Yeah. There's much better sensing technology that can help, you know, where utilities are now than there were just 10 years ago. But I say all that only to say, you know, to put it politely, stuff happens when you're in major construction. You know, when I Talked about the I90 bridge in Mercer island, well, that construction has needed to be ripped out and redone, unfortunately, because of quality issues with the construction. During COVID we thought we were going great guns during COVID and the oversight wasn't there.
- [64:33]
Interviewer
While you were at the FTA, were you involved in adding FAST41, the NEPA streamlining process for large transportation projects? I know that FAST41 was passed after you left the agency, but were you involved in it beforehand?
- [64:46]
Peter Rogoff
I would have been already as undersecretary and I was not particularly involved in that. But let me tell you a couple of things that I am particularly focused on that we accomplished for all is at fta. Most importantly, there was a huge gaping hole in federal safety regulation when it came to local transit rail operators as opposed to commuter rail systems. Let me help define the difference. Commuter rail systems are officially in the law. They run over the general system of railroads, but they are the Long island railroads, the major commuter lines that run suburb to center city, sometimes on shared freight track, sometimes on their own track. And they are regulated by the Federal Railroad Administration. They get their funds from the Federal Transit Administration. But their safety regulation from a very voluminous rule book put out over many, many decades by the Federal Railroad Administration for light rail systems and subways and streetcars that do not, or even like heavy rail systems like the Washington Metro system or the New York City subway. There was really no federal oversight of their safety operations at all. And this became very apparent when I was serving as administrator and we had the Rhode Island Avenue Washington Metro crash that killed nine people.
- [66:09]
Interviewer
I was living in D.C. at the time.
- [66:11]
Peter Rogoff
Yeah, right. And if you'll remember that Washington Metro was having many, many other problems, including fires, smoke in the tunnels, all kinds of other issues. And as I was digging into it, you know, I came to better appreciate. I kind of knew it in the abstract, but as FTA administrator, I didn't know it. No. Hitting concrete right away on the fact that there were no federal regulations as to how they, you know, handled their safety posture and all. And we did actually, again, the old school way. The Obama administration submitted a bill to Congress for its consideration to extend safety authority over those systems to the Federal Transit Administration. And I spent a lot of time convincing people that we were not going to recreate the federal railroad rulebook that we would go to a much more performance based safety system focused approach to regulating safety for those systems. The program is still, I would argue, kind of in its birthing years, but it's a much stronger program than it was back then. But it's an interesting thing to observe because I think if a different system other than Washington Metro was having those burdens, I'm not sure we would have gotten that bill passed. But because of all of Congress being not only in D.C. seeing the Washington Post, but also a great many people riding that system every day who are adjacent to, if not in the halls of power, we were able to get that bill adopted as part of a reauthorization bill down the line that was one another one. It sounds like a small thing, but it was a very big thing. Thankfully in place by the time Hurricane Sandy happened. When I was working in the Senate there is and had we were always working with what was called the Federal Highway Administration Emergency Relief Program. It was a program in place to reimburse states for highways that were washed out or destroyed as a result of natural disasters. And this was a program that provided 100% reimbursement. It's a very generous program. And whenever there'd be major hurricanes, earthquakes and such, there'd be large releases of this funding and the appropriations committee needed to replenish the program. Transit had no similar program. If you were a transit agency and you were destroyed and or had major damage as a result of these same disasters, you through your governor had to apply for FEMA funds. Now many of these transit agencies have at best a distant relationship with their governor. Certain systems like in New York and New Jersey are run by the governor. But others, the localized ones, often get zero dollars from the state. It sound transit, we got zero dollars from the state. And FEMA had these rules for reimbursing really all FEMA eligible applicants and that is you had to only get paid to return the asset to the condition it was in the day before the disaster. So they were literally requiring transit agencies even if they could get through the morass and get the money that if they had an eight year old bus that got flooded and destroyed, they had to go out on the market and try and buy a bus that was 8 years old. That's how ridiculously painful and absurd the FEMA process was for transit agencies. And remember, we had a highway program for emergency relief that was working for those grantees very well. So one thing we were able to get into law was a companion Emergency relief program for transit agencies. And thankfully that program was already on the books when Hurricane Sandy happened because it was the largest transit disaster in the history of the country, involving billions of dollars in rebuilding the transit infrastructure in New York and New Jersey and as far north as Maine and as far south as Maryland. And so that was one of the things that just kind of happened in the lick of time, but was game changing. And that program is still on the books and is serving transit agencies all over the place. And unfortunately, if our climate trajectory means we're going to have more of these natural disasters, that program is going to be even more important going forward.
- [70:27]
Interviewer
As you know, American transit costs, along with lots of building costs, but transit costs are exceptionally high, higher than our international peers on a dollars per mile basis. Broadly speaking. What do you chalk that up to?
- [70:41]
Peter Rogoff
Well, I think there's a variety of factors and some of those comparisons are not all apples to apples, but I think the Delta is large enough that it's certainly relevant. Part of it is the very lengthy process that transit projects here need to go through in terms of consulting and making everybody happy along the way through the environmental process. I'm dealing with a transit agency right now that is short of money to finish a project, but none of the board members want to shrink or maybe have something less than an iconic station in their own community. There being, you know, local elected officials that are looking out for their tenuring. There's nothing wrong with that. But you know, I think a lot of these transit agencies or transit projects that you're seeing compared to in Europe, the European counterpart is being run by like a national entity that has a lot more power to just move through the process and get things done quickly. I think there are, you know, factors, you know, sometimes folks lose sight of the fact, you know, when I say this is not a complete apples to apples comparison. Some of those national authorities that are building transit agencies in other countries are having some of their costs paid for by other national entities. So let me give you an example. When you're providing and building electrified rail in Europe, the national agency can just go to their neighboring national, you know, national agency that provides power and say you need to wire up all of our traction power needs and new substations and provide the power sometimes for free. We don't have that luxury here. So that is just one of those things that helps drive that. I think in some cases things can be over designed here in part because of the requirements of nepa.
- [72:32]
Interviewer
When you say over designed, what do you mean?
- [72:36]
Peter Rogoff
Heights of station ceilings. I believe we have sometimes stricter, more stringent fire and life safety requirements. All of which adds to cost. And I really shouldn't have used the phrase over design because I'm not here to tell you that our standard isn't the one that the whole world should have, but the standards are different. I think that could also add to cost. I think there's just a certain bureaucratic inertia. Inertia is the right word, but it just kind of slows things down. Especially now in the hyperinflationary environment where we're in. Time is money. And if it takes us seven years to get a project off the ground and it takes the European counterparts two and a half, they're saving a ton of money right there.
- [73:20]
Interviewer
Last question for you. If you were advising the next federal transit administrator and they were especially interested in what you'd learned on getting money out the door faster, streamlining, grant making processes, what advice would you have for them?
- [73:36]
Peter Rogoff
Boy, I think first and most importantly, as I said before, is to recognize that if you've seen one transit agency, you've seen one transit agency two, you really need to know how they're governed, how they're funded, to figure out how to help them solve their problem. I think transit expansion, in part because dollars are tight, often has to operate on hope. You need to kind of scrape under the hype sometimes and really figure out what their cash flows are and how and to what extent the federal government can help. You know, getting the dollars out the door quickly is not always, not always the best thing for a program that's just half baked because you want there to be a reasonable time to deliver whatever the goods are. We've got a huge problem going on right now that I'm working on in another sphere and it's, there's all of this interest and desire and money going to expanding the fleet of zero emission buses. Everyone wants, you know, especially their elected officials and especially in states that are very focused on clean air, wants to. In fact, California has a mandate to go to zero emission buses by a year. Certain. Meanwhile in Austin, Texas, the transit agency, because the supplier, somehow we have, one of the biggest suppliers of electric buses in the United States, found a way to go bankrupt even at a historic level of purchase orders and they have to park over 30 buses until they can figure out where they're going to get parts. We've got transit agencies that are taking receipt of the buses, but the local utilities are being so slow to actually wire up the power needed for the charging stations that they're parking their buses and not operating them, which is actually a very bad way to treat a bus. From Maineha's perspective, getting things out fast isn't always the solution. Getting things out well and smartly and in a coordinated fashion is the solution. I would love a new FTA administrator to work with the Energy Department on this charging infrastructure issue. It's not always just what you have authority over. It's what allies you could bring to the table to help fix the industry problem.
- [75:59]
Peter Orszag
The other thing you learn when trying to advance policy changes is that timing really is everything. I will always remember when we first took over from the Bush administration, there were accusations, not all of them wrong, that the criteria that we used to decide which major rail expansions qualified for funding and which didn't really work to the disadvantage of minority communities. In fact, Keith Ellison, who was the then congressman from Minnesota, now Attorney General, introduced a bill calling our process racist. And I knew that there were problems with that program, and it really exhibited itself in a project that was being developed to connect Minneapolis and St. Paul with light rail. They were literally going to build the foundations for three of the stations, but not build the stations themselves in locations that were in the heart of the black and Hispanic community between Ramsey and Hennepin county, precisely because the added cost of those three stations that might serve some of the most transit dependent population was going to put the cost of the project above the Bush administration criteria. But OMB was very enamored with this criteria. They thought it was kind of a good merit based way to distribute money. So we had to appeal to Secretary LaHood and I, to OMB to allow us to reverse it. The week we finally had the meeting, Secretary LaHood and I to go talk to OMB Director Orszag, was the week that it came out that while he was engaged to one woman, he was about to have a child by another woman.
- [77:38]
Santi Ruiz
Peter Orszag.
- [77:39]
Peter Orszag
Peter Orszag. Peter Orszag was focused that week on keeping his job. So when we went and appealed to him to make this policy change, he was amenable. He was agreeable. And it was very important to him that we told all the members of Congress that Peter Orszag helped make this happen. That's when I say timing is everything.
- [77:57]
Peter Rogoff
It really is.
- [77:58]
Peter Orszag
If you want to keep that, that's up to you.
- [78:01]
Peter Rogoff
I do want to keep that.
- [78:02]
Peter Orszag
I mean, it is.
- [78:03]
Peter Rogoff
It's a statement of fact.
- [78:05]
Peter Orszag
You know, the other thing I would just mention, and I don't know if this is true. But I had an interesting interface. There are some times when you're a member of a team, political team, that you're charged with trying to help fix a problem, and it doesn't fit neatly into your job description. So I was still serving as the Federal Transit Administrator, but I had a lengthy relationship with Senator Inouye's office because he was the senior appropriator on the Appropriations Committee. And I also had a good deal of experience with what's called the Essential Air Service program that subsidizes airlines to serve remote areas that otherwise wouldn't be served. And the island of Molokai, where the leper colony historically has been, lost its air service. And somehow, as I was just in meetings that really, I was just sitting around the table, I started helping work with Secretary LaHood on how to fix the problem. And I was charged with fixing the problem. I was the transit administrator. It was nowhere near my job description, but a fix needed to be happened. And you use the talent you have. And I was frankly flattered that he asked me to help fix it. And I worked with the office to help make it happen. And I think it's a good listen for any leader.
- [79:20]
Peter Rogoff
Right?
- [79:21]
Peter Orszag
What are all the talents that everyone brings to the table? And if people could look past their territoriality and recognize that everyone can help them, even if it's not in their job description, you can get better results.