During a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) gave opening remarks about infrastructure investments across the United States.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you all for joining us to our three witnesses whom I'll introduce in a moment.
00:04For too long, too many people in Ohio, too many people across the nation thought for
00:09good reason that their leaders had given up making our infrastructure, making our manufacturing
00:14base the best in the world.
00:16Congress's inaction and the empty promises of presidents of both parties left Americans
00:23to fend for themselves as they swerved to avoid even bigger potholes, as they bypassed
00:28dilapidated bridges, as they dodged chunks of concrete falling from decaying overpasses,
00:34as they waited longer and longer for buses that were getting older and older.
00:39Americans saw the consequences of years of congressional inaction and presidents' broken
00:44promises.
00:45And they watched as other countries, our competitors and our adversaries alike, added high-speed
00:50rail, built better roads, upgraded their water and sewer, installed 5G networks.
00:56Our failing infrastructure was only compounded by a misguided tax and trade policies that
01:02shuttered factories in places like Zanesville, places like my hometown of Mansfield and places
01:08like Kathy and Mike Knisely's hometown of Lima and Chillicothe and jobs shipped overseas.
01:15Last week's hearing, I talked about how our economy and national security interests are
01:19interconnected.
01:20Ensuring that the United States leads the world in producing semiconductor chips is
01:25critical to both our entire economy and our national security.
01:29Because of the work of many of the Senators on this committee, we passed the Bipartisan
01:33Infrastructure Law and the Chips in Science Act.
01:37But people don't really care that we passed a bill that's sort of inside baseball.
01:41They care about results.
01:42Today let's look at the results.
01:4560,000 infrastructure projects, 60,000 already underway across the country because of the
01:50Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
01:53These projects are improving 165,000 miles of roads, 9,400 bridges are getting repaired.
02:01Every state is benefiting.
02:03The Mobile River Bridge in Alabama is getting improvements.
02:07Rural and tribal communities in Minnesota and Iowa and other states are getting new
02:10buses and vans.
02:11We're making bus and rail stations that were built before the Americans with Disabilities
02:16Act finally accessible in places like Philadelphia and Cleveland.
02:22Six years ago, Rob Portman and I introduced the Bridge Investment Act to replace or repair
02:26the hundreds of bridges in Ohio and thousands around the country that in many cases had
02:30not had serious repairs in literally decades.
02:34Now because of the years of work we did that culminated in the Bipartisan Infrastructure
02:38Law, we're finally, finally building a new Brent Spence companion bridge over the Ohio
02:44River.
02:45We're replacing the 90-year-old Western Hills Viaduct, crucial to Cincinnati.
02:50Brent Spence, for example, a critical link in the supply chain network, transports 160,000
02:56cars and trucks and $2 billion in goods every single day.
03:00That's 3%, think of that, 3% of the country's entire GDP.
03:05It's part of the fabric of the city of Cincinnati, helping to create the vibrancy of one of America's
03:09great cities.
03:11But Ohioans know Brent Spence is as dated as it is dangerously crowded.
03:15We've heard from Ohioans who are concerned about concrete crumbling on the Western Hills
03:19Viaduct.
03:20We're fixing that.
03:21We're seeing new construction across Ohio.
03:23It's not just huge projects like Brent Spence and the Intel fabs in Licking County.
03:29We're seeing major upgrades to streets and bridges across my state, including Ohio's
03:34rural counties in Appalachia.
03:36We announced this month the Market Street Bridge, which connects Steubenville with West
03:41Virginia.
03:42That will finally be replaced.
03:43We're making critical investments to modernize public transit.
03:46Ohioans take 21 million trips, 21 million trips on transit every day, and then buses
03:52and trains and all the infrastructure required to operate them are not up to date, slower.
03:58Service is slower, service is less reliable.
04:01Imagine driving, think about this, imagine driving the same car every day for 40 years.
04:06That's what operators on Cleveland's RTA in its 60 cars have been doing for years.
04:13The newest of these 60 cars is 40 years old.
04:18In Cleveland, I met with workers whose job it is to maintain railcars that date back
04:23to the Reagan administration.
04:26At the railcar garage that I visited on the east side of Cleveland, you actually see these
04:31workers over in the corner machining replacement parts for cars that are sold.
04:35They can't find replacement parts, they have to machine the replacement parts to keep these
04:41trains running.
04:42That's the only way to get the parts because they don't make them anymore.
04:45Now finally because of the infrastructure law, Cleveland will get 60 new railcars.
04:51We know the U.S. lacks a robust national passenger rail network that other major economic powers
04:56have.
04:57We're changing that.
04:58We're seeing construction of new facilities to improve transit and rail service like Akron
05:03Metros, its public transit system, its new maintenance facility, and a new Amtrak station
05:10in Bryan, Ohio, a small town in the northwest corner of the state.
05:14We know how crucial manufacturing and innovation are to our economy.
05:17Modern infrastructure today is driven by information technology, the microchips that power our
05:23machines and computers are the products of American design and ingenuity.
05:28We've become dependent on other countries for their production.
05:3290% of the chips we invented are now made overseas.
05:36Taiwan is dominant today.
05:38Alarmingly, China is trying to become dominant tomorrow.
05:40We wrote the Chips and Science Act to change that trajectory.
05:44It's allowing us to build a new generation of chip production facilities in Ohio and
05:48around the country.
05:50These investments are growing our economy.
05:52They're creating jobs and opportunity.
05:54In the past three years, we've added 670,000 construction jobs, 670,000 construction jobs
06:02added to the U.S. economy.
06:03Think about that.
06:06This is only the start.
06:07Hiring is expected to pick up even more in the coming years.
06:10More and more projects will get underway.
06:11That doesn't even take into account the jobs throughout the manufacturing supply chain
06:16because we made sure these laws, again, first ever in the last few years, have the strongest
06:22Buy America rules ever.
06:24The steel, iron, pipes, and other construction materials are being made in Ohio and across
06:28the U.S. by American workers, not, as previously, imported from China.
06:34Pipe fitters, bricklayers, ironworkers, steelworkers, carpenters, machinists are good middle-class
06:40jobs with high wages and on-the-job training opportunities where you can develop a craft
06:44and build a career.
06:45One of the highlights of the last few years for me was I saw Mike Knisley in Columbus.
06:54He's the Secretary of Treasury of the Ohio State Building Construction Trades.
06:56He represents the men and women who are doing the real work on these projects.
07:00I was in an event last summer with Mike in our state's capital, a graduation for a training
07:05program that places workers directly into union apprenticeships in the trades, creating
07:12opportunity for so many people who haven't had that opportunity before.
07:16Every one of these graduates, mostly men and women in their 20s, had on T-shirts that said
07:23in big black letters on the back, direct path to the middle class.
07:28It's the opportunities that most of these young people didn't dream of having.
07:32It's the jobs.
07:33We're creating a direct path to the middle class.
07:35It's how you build an economy that upholds the dignity of work.