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Presented by Bank of America: | | | | |  | | By Debra Kahn | | | | | | | 
Lee Ann Eager heads the agency in charge of California's transportation spending. | Photo Courtesy of the California Transportation Commission | Lee Ann Eager is in charge of California's transportation spending. As the chair of the California Transportation Commission, she heads the agency that approves most state and federal funding — roughly $7 billion annually — for roads, passenger rail, transit, bike lanes and sidewalks. Under Gov. Gavin Newsom , the Transportation Commission has begun trying to look at alternatives to expanding roads when trying to relieve congestion and to prioritize emissions reductions within infrastructure projects. Eager, who also serves as the president and CEO of the Fresno County Economic Development Corporation, says she wants to focus on safety and equity across geographic areas. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
| | | | A message from Bank of America: Women spend 200 million hours a day globally to get water, but access to capital for infrastructure can change that. Matt Damon and Gary White are combining practical solutions, relentless optimism, and storytelling to help create global access to clean water. In Bank of America’s, That Made All the Difference episode, they discuss scaling these initiatives to help 40 million individuals, particularly women, buy back their time and agency, and enhance their income. | | | The idea of suspending gasoline taxes has been sweeping the state and country given inflation, high oil prices and the expected influx of federal infrastructure funding. You're in charge of spending most of the state's gas tax revenue. Do you have a take on Newsom's or lawmakers' proposals to suspend the gas tax or tax increases? It's a little bit scary right now, just because we don't know when the federal money will come, even though it's looming out there, and we hope that we'll be able to use it. Suspending the gas tax right now, before we know what's coming down the pike, I would be a little leery about doing that. In every community across the state of California, they want us to fix their roads. They want us to ensure that we put in safe bike lanes. They want us to make sure that the bridges are safe. But in order to do that, we do need the state funding to ensure that all of those things happen. Even though I know right now, with the crazy prices of gas, that 10 cents would really help when you're at the pump, but when you look at what the alternative is for not spending that 10 cents — that your road might not be able to be fixed, that it might not be safe to be able to continue down that path — for me, I'm willing to pay the 10 cents to ensure that we can do everything that we need to do.
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A high-speed rail viaduct paralleling Highway 99 near Fresno, Calif. | (Rich Pedroncelli, File/AP Photo) | What are your plans for all the new federal infrastructure funding coming California's way — about $30 billion over the next five years and $1.75 billion over the next year? Some of that certainly has to go on on roads and bridges. CTC does have funding to upgrade our bridges. We're getting to a place right now where some of those bridges are on that edge where they're still safe, but five years from now, 10 years from now, they might not be. So it's a perfect time to do a lot of those upgrades, but then there's going to be some additional funding that we can apply for through those federal funds. Some of these things that we're wanting to do, whether it's high-speed rail in California or inland ports, some of the things that are new and innovative. You just became chair of the CTC this month. What priorities do you have as a representative of a fairly large city and of the Central Valley in general? There hasn't been a chair from the valley in a long time. Sometimes in California, there is a fight between North and South — where should money go? It's important for the entire state to remember there's a whole 4 million people in the central part of California. It's also really important to remember that there's an east and west and that the eastern part of California somehow, over time, has been left behind. And so all of those western cities, whether it's Los Angeles or San Diego or San Francisco along the coast, they have been able to prosper, where the eastern part of California has had a more difficult time. I think it's really important when we're looking at equity issues, to also look at geographic equity. We do have to ensure that we're getting people off of the freeways as much as possible and into public transportation. But there's places that, right now, that's not possible. So what else can we do to make sure that the roads are safe? Certainly equity is number one. Safety is number two. No matter what we do, let's make sure that the people who are using our transportation, using our roads, have a safe way to get from point A to point B.
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| Environmentalists are paying more attention to your agency now than in recent years, in part because of this Climate Action Plan for Transportation Infrastructure that the agency endorsed, which seems like a sea change in your positioning and your approach to funding transportation and infrastructure projects. How do you see transportation spending evolving to incorporate climate concerns more broadly? Everything that we do, we put on that lens of what does that do for our air quality? What does that do for equity? What does that do to ensure that the people of California are staying safe not just on our roads, but in our air? Local folks need to know as we're doing our future [funding] guidelines going forward, it will probably be more strict and looking at as we fund this particular project, make sure it meets these requirements. Things did change with Covid. People weren't taking any public transportation and so it was difficult to say, 'Okay, we have CAPTI, we have to look at transit and how do we get people from cars to public transportation?' In June of 2020, it was really difficult to look at it from that, but we looked at in our guidelines, for the next five years, for the next 10 years, how is it that we can get there so that we really can ensure that we put those priorities in those transit funding, so that we can get to that place where everybody does have the ability to get public transportation at some point? One of the things that we're working on right now that we didn't ever think of before was inland ports. Instead of picking up produce in Fresno and putting it on a truck and driving to Long Beach and sitting outside the Port of Long Beach for three days, trying to get into the port, you pick up whatever product that is, you go maybe five miles to that inland port, it gets on a train right there, then we'll take it to the ports directly. And so you have to really look at additional funding for the ports to be able to accommodate all that; look at funding for all of those inland ports, and there might be five or six on that east side of California.
| | | | A message from Bank of America:   | | | There's a question as to whether lawmakers are going to approve more state funding for high-speed rail this year, in part because of that tension between north, south and the middle. Do you see those budget negotiations getting resolved? I understand that Southern California, L.A. Metro, they need some additional funds in order to finish what they started there and getting people around the L.A. area and getting people off the roads in Southern California. Absolutely we need to find a way to do that. But it should never be a competition between Southern California and the Central Valley. It should not be 'Somebody deserves it more than somebody else.' There were some things that were said originally about, 'Nobody lives in Central California, that train is going to go from where no one lives to where no one wants to go,' which was really offensive to the people of the Central Valley. We're talking 4.2 million people who live in the Valley, who are the lifeblood of this state and, we feed the world out of the Central Valley. To say that we're not as important as some other area has been a slap in the face for a while. We're not saying we're more important, but we're certainly not less.
| | | | A message from Bank of America: What if clean water could help women achieve true equality?
Co-Founders Matt Damon and Gary White joined forces to create Water.org and WaterEquity, initiatives that have helped 40 million individuals, particularly women, buy back their time, agency, and enhance their income.
“The poorest people in the world were paying more for water than the middle and upper class because they weren’t connected to infrastructure. Millions upon millions of girls are missing school because they go and collect money from the family and the ripple effect is incalculable,” said Damon.
Learn about how these leaders are combining practical solutions, relentless optimism, and storytelling to help create global access to clean water in Bank of America’s, That Made All the Difference episode. | | | | | | — Don't be a "doomer," these young climate advocates say. — "There’s a distinct possibility that a great deal of existing carbon offsets are effectively fake,” but one timber company exec wants to fix them. — Cryptocurrency mining companies are worried about their energy-sucking reputations. They credit Elon Musk with nudging them to be greener (remember: Tesla is fighting a shareholder resolution to divest from crypto over environmental concerns).
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