Update: this attack has been thwarted, but the battle isn’t over.
Below is from Jeff Miller, President/CEO of the Alliance for Biking & Walking. Please act today, Sept. 15, or tomorrow morning at the latest, to save bike-ped funding in the federal transportation budget.
Transportation Enhancements (TE) is under attack again. We expect Senator Coburn (R-OK) to offer two amendments to strike funding to TE in the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Bill being debated on the Senate floor TOMORROW (9/16/09).
The two Coburn amendments are S. Amendment 2370 and S. Amendment 2371.
S. Amendment 2370 will prohibit funding for Transportation Enhancements if the Highway Trust Fund does not contain amounts sufficient to cover unfunded highway authorizations (and the Fund is bankrupt).
S. Amendment 2371 will allow states to opt out of the 10% set aside rule that require states to spend at least 10% of their surface transportation funding on Transportation Enhancements.
We would ask you to do the following:
1. Please send an alert to your grassroots. The League of American Bicyclists has an alert for grassroots at http://capwiz.com/lab/callalert/index.tt?alertid=14032801. It provides phone numbers for their Senators as well as talking points.
2. We would also like to ask you as Leaders in the bicycle community to call or email your Senators’ offices with specific examples of local projects built using TE funds — especially if you have examples where they attended a ribbon cutting or event.
3. Please send America Bikes <daniel@americabikes.org> examples of really good transportation enhancement projects. We’ve gotten a request from Senators for examples of great projects in many states to help fight off this amendment.
Please help join us in sounding the alarms and taking action today and tomorrow morning!
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