Emanuel says infrastructure money a priority for Obama

President-elect Obama’s chief of staff-designate said
Tuesday that billions of dollars in infrastructure building and repair will be
a key component of Obama’s economic recovery act.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) told reporters aboard Obama’s
plane that a consensus emerged Tuesday between Obama and a bipartisan group of
governors that money for infrastructure is needed to rebuild both the country
and the economy.

{mosads}Emanuel said both Democratic and Republican governors
view these investments as “essential” for economic recovery in their states,
adding that the new administration sees it “as essential to the economic
recovery for the country.”

“They need those resources, we need those resources,” he
stated. “It’s good for the economy; it produces jobs immediately.”

Emanuel said the first half of the meeting between the
president-elect and the governors dealt with the need for infrastructure
funding and the positive impact it could have on the economy. The “ballpark”
amount used for the discussions was about $136 billion.

The Bush administration has repeatedly dismissed the idea
of infrastructure spending as a way to blunt the current economic crisis,
citing arguments made by the Department of Transportation that the projects
would take too long to clear and have little sustainable impact on the economy.

But Emanuel said a number of Republican and Democratic
governors with whom Obama spoke at the National Governors Association (NGA)
meeting in Philadelphia on Tuesday said that their states have projects that
are ready to go and are just waiting for the resources.

“A lot of people say, you know, ‘It doesn’t happen, it
takes too long,’ ” Emanuel said. “There’s now a consensus that we’ve for a long
time had to deny our investments in our critical needs … be that refurbished
schools, our water treatment facilities, our roads, our bridges, our
mass-transit systems, our 21st century infrastructure, universal broadband,
medical ID  … [I]f we did [invest in those projects], we would be a more
productive economy. And that was shared by governors of both parties.”

Emanuel noted that Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) stated
that “we’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of years investing in roads
and bridges and schools in Iraq but denying those same investments here at
home.”

“We need to rebuild America, we need to build those
critical areas today to do it and an Economic Recovery Act has to do that,”
Emanuel said.