The Road to Jobs: The Fight for Transportation Equity (Gamaliel Foundation)

By Todd Swanstrom and Laura Barrett

Federal transportation policies are not easy to organize around. For over half a century, a growth machine has dominated federal highway policies, cemented (so to speak) by jobs, campaign contributions, and advance knowledge of highway locations. Swimming in a murky alphabet soup of acronyms (ISTEA, SAFETEA-LU, STP, CMAQ, MPO, etc.) federal transportation policies have often been invisible, and unaccountable, to the citizens.

If transportation policies were more democratically accountable, they could have great potential for
community-based organizations (CBOs). Transportation
touches every aspect of our lives. It connects people to jobs and other opportunities, like schools, recreation, and culture. Households without access to a car must rely upon public transit that has always had to wait in line behind highways to receive federal funds. The federal bias toward highways is a major cause of suburban sprawl. Highways
encourage job flight to the suburbs, leaving behind city and inner suburban neighborhoods with high unemployment.

At a time when federal spending on community development and job training is falling, spending on transportation is growing. The federal government spends over $67 billion a year on transportation, compared to only about $6 billion on community development and about $8 billion on job training programs of all kinds. An 18.4 cents per gallon tax on gasoline brings in more money each year and is earmarked only for transportation. Job training and community development have to compete with all the other demands on the federal budget.

Because every $1 billion spent on transportation creates an estimated 47,500 jobs, over 3 million jobs are at stake in federal transportation spending. More than half of these jobs are in construction, which paid $19.23 an hour on average in 2004. Well-paying construction jobs could make a big difference in high-poverty neighborhoods.

The shortage of skilled construction workers makes transportation an inviting target for community organizations. The construction industry needs to recruit up to 250,000 new craft workers a year. Skilled construction workers are trained in apprenticeships run by unions. CBOs could recruit new workers and serve as valuable political allies for unions in their struggles against the spread of open-shop nonunion construction.

The Alameda Corridor Initiative

The potential of tapping large transportation projects to provide jobs for disadvantaged communities was demonstrated by the L.A. Alameda Corridor project in the late 1990s. At $2.2 billion, the Alameda Corridor project was the nation's largest intermodal transportation project and it ran through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
CBOs in the path of the project knew that their communities would be disrupted by the construction and they wanted to make sure that they would benefit as well. In September 1997, an alliance of about 40 CBOs - led by Mary Ochs of the Center for Community Change L.A. office, Dennis Rockway of the Legal Aid Foundation and Benetta Johnson of the Greater Bethany Economic Development Corporation - created the Alameda Corridor Jobs Coalition (ACJC), a 501c(3).

n March 12, 1998 ACJC announced an historic agreement guaranteeing that at least 30 percent of the work hours in the project would be reserved for residents of the 30 zip codes that bordered the project. Dennis Rockway of the Legal Aid Foundation of Long Beach called this "the largest local hiring plan of any public works project in the history of the United States." The agreement called for 650 pre-apprenticeship training slots for construction trades. The pre-apprenticeship programs provided short-term training for acquiring the skills necessary to enter an apprenticeship program, such as basic math and how to handle tools.

CJC spun-off a separate corporation, ACJC TEC (Training and Employment Corporation), to do the outreach, hiring, and training for $7.5 million (about $7,500 per participant). ACJC TEC worked with eight CBOs to recruit participants and insure that they received an array of support services to help them succeed, including child care, transportation, car loans, and tools.

By just about any measure, the Alameda Corridor community workforce agreement was a huge success. The project exceeded its goals: local workers performed 31 percent of all hours on the Mid-Corridor project. Of the 880 graduating from the pre-apprenticeship program, 190 were former welfare recipients and 373 were ex-offenders. Taking into account reduced public expenditures, such as welfare and prisons, the total benefit to society may have been as much as half a billion dollars.

The Transportation Equity Network (TEN)

Rich Stolz of the Center for Community Change (CCC) had long recognized the potential benefits that federal transportation policy could provide for CBOs. Founded in 1968, CCC provides technical assistance to community groups advocating for urban and rural poor and lobbies at the national level to make government more responsive to the needs of the poor. In 1997, Stolz helped create the Transportation Equity Network (TEN), a coalition of 300 grassroots groups that included Smart Growth America and the Gamaliel Foundation, a diverse network of 1,600 faith congregations. TEN works to make federal transportation law more responsive to the needs of the poor and minorities.

TEN has worked to reframe national transportation policy away from an exclusive focus on moving people and goods to viewing transportation policy as having multiple goals, including community revitalization, poverty reduction, and improving the environment. TEN is an example of the supposedly difficult-to-sustain red-green coalition, a network focused on issues of equity but joined by typically more middle-class groups concerned about the environment and quality of life issues.

Federal transportation law is reauthorized, or rewritten, every six years. TEN won a number of victories in the 1998 reauthorization of federal transportation law, called TEA-21 and this success continued in the next battle of reauthorization. Finally, on August 10, 2005, President Bush signed the Safe Accountable Flexible and Efficient Transportation Equity Act - A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU), the nation's new $286 billion transportation law. Like the 1998 law, the new law included several TEN priorities:

• Improving the Job Access and Reverse Commute (JARC) Program by making it a formula grant with a guaranteed $700 million over six years;
• Requiring public participation plans to be developed with the involvement of local residents in the metropolitan transportation planning process, and requiring greater financial transparency; and
• Setting aside $1 million each year for transportation equity research demonstration programs.

TEN also wanted to spread the example of Alameda's successful workforce agreement to other regions around the country. However, legal counsel for the U.S. Department of Transportation argued that such agreements violated the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the U.S. Constitution: "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several states." (Article IV, Section 2) According to this interpretation, a workforce development agreement that required the contractor to hire from certain neighborhoods would discriminate against residents of another state.

TEN argued that workforce development agreements were not unconstitutional. After all, the federal government had used them before, most prominently in HUD's Section 3 program. Moreover, the courts had ruled that local hiring preferences are permitted if they meet certain tests, including showing that they address specific social and economic ills stemming from high unemployment. TEN worried, however, that the legal cloud hanging over workforce development would put a chill on local organizing for jobs. TEN knew that it could not change the legal interpretation by the administration, so it decided to try to persuade Congress to change the law.

During the SAFETEA-LU appropriations process, Representative Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA), who represents the Alameda Corridor area of Los Angeles, wrote an amendment that would have required all contractors on projects over $10 million to submit a plan to the state DOT "to establish a job training and community workforce development program" and provide assurances that they would make a "best effort" to direct not less than 30 percent of total hours worked on the project to local residents. The Republican leadership of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee rejected the amendment.

Millender-McDonald withdrew her amendment but no bill passed that year; Congress simply passed another temporary extension of TEA-21.

As Congress went back to the drawing board in 2005, it appeared the community workforce provision was dead. Dr. Ron Trimmer, an activist in United Congregations of Metro East (UCM), a Gamaliel affiliate in the East St. Louis, Illinois area vowed to resuscitate the workforce development amendment. A physicist by day and an activist by night, Trimmer had attended a TEN national meeting and he knew that UCM had good relations with two elected officials who could help: Congressman Jerry Costello (D-IL), a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee who represented East St. Louis, and Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D-IL).

Elected to the Senate in November 2004, Obama had a particularly close relationship with Gamaliel. A former organizer for Gamaliel in Chicago, Obama had worked under Mike Kruglik, the political director of Gamaliel. Kruglik's son now served on Obama's staff. Obama attended one of their public meetings in Chicago. Obama also recognized that he needed political connections in East St. Louis and certain African American clergy who were members of UCM also were heavily involved in turning out the black vote. He agreed to champion the workforce development provision.

TEN needed Republican support, however, or the workforce provision would not have a chance. Metropolitan Congregations United (MCU) is the counterpart to UCM on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River in St. Louis. With 76 member congregations, MCU is the kind of organization that politicians ignore at their peril. Over the years, MCU had developed a relationship with Senator Christopher "Kit" Bond (R-MO), one of the most influential senators in Washington. At a public meeting in St. Louis in the fall of 2004, MCU leaders read a letter from Senator Bond that supported the workforce provision. The thousands of people at the annual meeting "lifted up" Senators Bond and Obama for supporting workforce development.

Part of the reason why Republicans were willing to support the local hiring provision is that the language had been softened from requiring local hiring to encouraging it. After specifically citing the successful example of Alameda, the local hiring provision, Section 1920, expresses the "Sense of Congress" that "federal transportation projects should facilitate and encourage" collaboration between government and other interested parties, including CBOs, "to help leverage scarce training and community resources and to help ensure local participation in the building of transportation projects."

TEN's supporters in Congress were able to get Section 1920 inserted into the final bill that came out of conference committee and was passed by the House and the Senate. Strangely enough, however, when Rich Stolz of CCC and Laura Barrett of Gamaliel read through the bill they could not find Section 1920. It had literally fallen out of the bill onto the floor of the Senate. Todd Atkinson, an aide to Senator Obama, insisted to the leadership that it be put back into the bill, citing Obama's special relationship with Gamaliel. Leadership agreed. TEN had now achieved at least part of its objective: the U.S. Congress was on record as endorsing workforce development provisions on federal transportation projects.

Negotiating a Workforce Development Agreement in St. Louis
Even though the federal legislation did not require local hiring agreements, it did encourage them, providing what Stolz called an "organizing hook" for activists to mount a local campaign. Gamaliel and TEN groups acted quickly to take advantage of the new opening. They combined the workforce development "Sense of Congress" with a little known USDOT regulation encouraging states to use ½ of 1% of annual highway funds for job training. MCU's lead organizer, Dan Grandone, immediately identified the I-64/40 project in St. Louis as a target of opportunity. The $535 million I-64/40 project was the largest highway project in Missouri history and had generated intense media scrutiny.
MCU pulled together a broad coalition that included elected officials, CBOs, civil rights groups, and job training nonprofits. MCU crafted a two-pronged strategy to pressure MoDOT into agreeing to a local workforce plan.

First, MCU used its "one-on-ones" to form relationships with politicians and public officials possessing influence over federal highway funds and regional job training networks. This enabled MCU to gain information on how decisions are made and to form relationships with key allies who would help them to put pressure on MoDOT. MCU supplemented this "behind-the-scenes" program with a public strategy using citizen mobilization and media events to demonstrate mass support to elected officials and MoDOT as well as to galvanize their own members to continue the fight.

MoDOT is governed by the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission, that appoints the powerful Director of the Department. MoDOT had a new director, Pete Rahn, a relentless cheerleader who had promised to make MoDOT "forward thinking" and "customer-oriented." Above all, he promised to welcome citizen input. As one MCU organizer put it, Rahn's "street credibility" was on the line in how he responded to the workforce development proposal.

In an effort to put pressure on Rahn, MCU began drumming up public support for a public meeting on December 2, 2005. Held in a downtown St. Louis hotel at the same time as the Gamaliel National Leadership Assembly (NLA), the meeting drew over 1,100 supporters. A group of young people from a construction pre-apprenticeship program wearing white hardhats led chants from the floor. Run a bit like a revival (complete with a Gospel choir), the meeting included a testimonial by one of the young men who talked about how getting a construction job had transformed his life. MCU presented their demands and then a series of elected officials came forward to proclaim their support and sign the petition, including St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, who had won a racially polarized election and needed to cement black support.

Historically, African-Americans have been severely underrepresented in the construction industry in St. Louis. According to one study of city construction contracts for the period 1995-1999, blacks received just 5 percent of the prime contracts and only 11 percent of the subcontracts. The city of St. Louis was 51.2 percent black in 2000.

MCU managed to get local hiring on the agenda for the next meeting of the Highway Commission in the capitol, Jefferson City, on January 11, 2006. A Highway Commission spokesperson called and asked how many seats they should reserve. MCU asked how many they had. The spokesman said 90. MCU said, "We want them all." MCU shocked the Highway Commission by showing up with more than 200 supporters who packed the aisles and hallways. The delegation presented the Commission with over 3,000 signed cards expressing support for the demands and highlighted political support, noting that St. Louis Mayor Frances Slay, St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley, and a number of state senators and representatives supported their demands.

MoDOT Director Pete Rahn listened to the presentation but refused to make any commitments. He did report, however, that he had acquired the services of Julie Cunningham, Executive Director of the National Conference on Minority Transportation Officials, to facilitate a meeting of all the concerned stakeholders to come up with an overall plan to address the issue. During the negotiations, Cunningham worked skillfully to forge a solution.

In May of 2006, MCU, UCM, TEN and their union allies won the most progressive workforce development agreement with any state agency. MoDOT agreed to include the MCU/UCM workforce development platform in their Request for Proposals to highway contractors on the $550 million Highway 64 project. The amount of money that will be supplied to increase training opportunities for low-income people, minorities and women was the amount MCU/UCM requested - ½ of 1% of the project budget - $2.5 million. MoDOT also agreed to the workforce development goals that MCU/UCM set out: low-income people, minorities and women, will complete 30% of the apprentice work hours. If 500 jobs are created, the targeted population will fulfill 150 job slots.

The Growing Movement

The workforce campaign is now spreading across the country. After the Missouri victory, the Michigan Department of Transportation began negotiations with MI-VOICE (the Michigan state-wide Gamaliel affiliate) and Governor Jennifer Granholm announced at two MI-VOICE public meetings that she will develop a workforce development policy that will include the JOBS NOW platform (30% of work hours reserved for low-income people and ½ of 1% of highway funds for job training). MI-VOICE is currently working on the policy with Michigan's DOT.

In Minnesota, U.S. Representative Jim Ramstad (R-MN) helped arrange a meeting with the Deputy Director of Minnesota's DOT, lending support to the workforce development efforts of ISAIAH.

MoDOT has also met with the Gamaliel Kansas City affiliate, MORE2, and has verbally agreed to reserve ½ of 1% of the Paseo Bridge budget for workforce development and to consider a similar goal to 30% of work hours reserved for low-income people, minorities and women. MoDOT also said they are using this model for two other rural construction projects. MORE2 also got two of their leaders appointed to ordinance committees for Kansas City that are writing new language for a minority contractor ordinance and developing a new workforce development ordinance.

In Pennsylvania, Governor Rendell met with 300 members of the Pittsburgh Interfaith Impact Network (PIIN) and the Gamaliel weeklong training class members and said he was "embarrassed" that he had not heard of the ½ of 1% USDOT workforce development policy and that he would work with PIIN to implement the policy for Pennsylvania. If Pennsylvania enacts the ½ of 1% policy, it will be the third state to do so; only South Carolina and Maine have the policy on record.

Local JOBS NOW campaigns designed to require workforce development plans for large city government construction projects are underway in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Albany, St Paul, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Saginaw, Kalamazoo, Detroit, Niagara Falls, and East St Louis. NOAH, the Gamaliel affiliate in Niagara Falls, New York, was able to get ten local politicians, including U.S. Congresswoman, Louise Slaughter, two New York State Senators, and the mayor of Niagara Falls, to sign on to get Local Hiring language written into any RFPs (request for proposals) for projects using any governmental money, whether state, federal or local, or for private projects that enjoy public tax subsidies. The goal is to require that 30 percent of the hours on these projects be performed by local residents who are at or below the poverty level.

The Battle Ahead

Although the movement for transportation equity has traveled a long way, it still has many miles to go. Federal transportation policy is still biased toward highways over mass transit and discourages citizen groups from getting involved in setting regional transportation policies.
TEN is already gearing up for the reauthorization of SAFETEA-LU in 2008. Hearings begin in spring of 2007. TEN has a broad agenda, including increased funding for public transit and linking affordable housing to transit-oriented development. Workforce development is a high priority, most importantly changing federal legislation from simply encouraging workforce development to actually requiring it.

Laura Barrett has worked as an organizer for more than 20 years. She has worked for the Gamaliel Foundation for the last three years as the Assistant Director of Metro Equity and is now coordinating the Local Workforce Development Campaign, other transportation work, and Gamaliel's Individual Donor Campaign. A professor of Public Policy at Saint Louis University, Todd Swanstrom is co-author of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century. He is presently doing research on transportation, workforce development, and the possibilities for progressive regional policies.

TEN Goes to Congress

On March 14-15, 27 activists representing grassroots organizations around the country met with Congress on behalf of TEN. Hosted by Smart Growth America, the group included activists from Hawaii, Pittsburgh, the Gulf Coast, Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis, Detroit, and many other cities. The main goal was to establish relationships with members of Congress and their staffs leading up to the reauthorization of federal transportation law (SAFETEA-LU) in 2008. With the Democrats having taken control of both houses, new chairpersons of key committees are in place and Congress appears to be more receptive than ever to TEN's equity agenda.

TEN members met with thirty-two Representatives, Senators, and their staffs from eleven different states. Senator Barbara Boxer (D. CA), Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, hosted a bi-partisan Briefing for TEN. Six legislative staffers attended the briefing, hearing stories from around the country of how inadequate transportation harms low-income and minority persons. TEN also had a short-term agenda. The Bush Administration budget called for a $309 million cut in transit funding and new rules issued by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) undermine the ability of cities to secure new transit systems and discourage transit-oriented development.

Representative James Oberstar (R., Minn.), Chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has promised to hold oversight hearings on the implementation of SAFETEA-LU in spring 2007. TEN members have talked to Oberstar about the need to make sure the Bush Administration adheres to the law.

TEN activists also requested that members of Congress send letters to the Department of Transportation (DOT) requesting that the provision allowing ½ of 1% of federal highway funds to be used for job training be extended to federal transit funding. This would greatly expand the potential of TEN's workforce development initiative.

If you are interested in finding out more about TEN, contact Dr. Ron Trimmer, National Issues Chair for Gamaliel, 618-604-6216, trimmer@charter.net or Laura Barrett, National Policy Director, 314-443-5915, laurabarrett@gamaliel.org.