October 15, 2015 – 5:00 p.m.

The leaders of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are expected to release the text of a draft surface transportation reauthorization bill tomorrow (Friday, October 16). (Aides to T&I members have been invited to a 10 a.m. briefing tomorrow to have the bill explained to them, so the release of the text will probably wait until after that.)

Chairman Bill Shuster (R-PA) and ranking minority member Peter DeFazio (D-OR) have reached agreement on all of the major provisions of the bill, but delays in drafting that outline into legislative language have pushed the release of the bill past the aspirational deadline of today.

We have been delaying the finalization and release of this week’s issue of Eno Transportation Weekly in anticipation of the T&I Committee making news in an otherwise slow recess week. Once T&I posts the bill text tomorrow, we will mirror it here on our Highway Trust Fund Reference Page here under the header “RECENT LEGISLATIVE ACTIVITY” and will send out this week’s ETW as soon as possible thereafter with an initial round of analysis. We will post more analysis of the draft bill to the HTF Reference Page later on Friday and through the weekend as it becomes available, so keep checking back.

Shuster and DeFazio hope to introduce the draft bill (which will be called the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2015) on Tuesday, October 20 and have scheduled a full T&I Committee markup of the bill for Thursday, October 22 at 10:00 a.m. in 2167 Rayburn. Any T&I members who wish to offer amendments to the draft STRRA legislation will need to submit them to the Committee by 1 p.m. on Wednesday, October 21 (but if the members want Shuster and DeFazio to consider including the amendment in the bipartisan managers package, the amendment needs to be submitted as early as possible).