Norris Appointed to Join Effort to Examine Financial Health of State’s Transportation System

ERIC SMITH | The Daily News
October 10, 2008

In the eight years Mark Norris has been in the state senate, the Collierville Republican has made transportation issues a priority.

Not only does he represent District 32 – an area that includes transportation-reliant counties such as Shelby, Tipton, Lauderdale and Dyer – but Norris served as chairman of the state’s transportation committee from 2005 to 2007.

He was instrumental in bringing U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to Memphis in 2006 for a congressional hearing on national transportation matters, and that same year the Tennessee Public Transportation Association named him Legislator of the Year.

Now, Norris can add one more bullet point to his resume. The senate majority leader recently was appointed to a joint study committee on transportation finance to examine the financial health of Tennessee’s transportation system. Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey assigned Norris to the post based on the senator’s transportation acumen.

Calling transportation the “arterial system for the lifeblood of our economy,” Norris told The Daily News this week he is honored to fight for the needs not only of Memphis and West Tennessee, but also for the entire state and the nation.

“It’s a pleasure for me to do this here in my own backyard,” he said. “But there are tremendous challenges ahead.”

Spicing up meat and potatoes

The challenges Norris referred to lie in the dearth of federal funding for transportation. Last month the U.S. Department of Transportation required $8 billion of emergency funding just to stay afloat, and these national funding problems spell big trouble for roads and public transportation in Tennessee.

“People don’t really know how transportation finance – or the lack thereof – affects them,” Norris said. “It’s hard to make it interesting, but I’ve been working hard for the past two years to raise everyone’s consciousness level about it.”

Norris said he’s looking for “sound bytes” that will clarify these financial problems for the public and help them better understand how transportation affects everyone’s lives. That means showing the extra costs associated with the delays in getting to work or the delays in moving freight from Point A to Point B.

“As a practical matter, people don’t really think about where the roads they drive come from. They take it all for granted,” he said. “It’s like any meat and potatoes issue. It’s infrastructure, and it’s boring until people are burdened with the absence of it.”

The absence could come sooner than later, Norris said, because federal highway funds are drying up. So Tennessee’s new joint study committee on transportation finance – which includes members of the Senate, House, various state departments and transportation industries – has a tall task ahead of it.

The committee is “charged with studying the various sources of federal and state revenue used to fund Tennessee’s transportation system, investigating ways to enhance these existing sources and identifying potential new sources of revenue for future growth,” a statement from the senator’s office read.

“That’s job one – to put into perspective where we fit in the federal system, first of all, and then run the scenarios on what we’re going to do in Tennessee if the feds don’t fund a new federal transportation bill,” Norris added.

Solutions for home

As home of the world’s busiest cargo airport, five Class I railroads, a robust river port and well-trafficked interstate highways, Memphis relies on a healthy transportation network as much as or more than any metropolitan area in the nation.

So Norris is particularly concerned with how these issues impact “America’s Distribution Center.” With that in mind, he is working on a plan that will tackle a wide range of issues locally and statewide. These include everything from bridge maintenance to transportation job creation.

Sometimes, the issues overlap.

“It’s a good time to be asking those questions, because there’s a lot of people who are going to be out of work here, unfortunately, in the next couple of years (because of the current financial crisis), and maybe we can combine several needs into a new public works program to get these bridges up to par and give people meaningful employment,” Norris aid.

Of course, figuring out how to pay for that is mission critical, which is why Norris advocates private and public collaboration for such things as a third bridge spanning the Mississippi River at Memphis. In that scenario, the trucking industry would fund a portion of the bridge and in return be allocated dedicated lanes across it.

These are just a few ways Norris is keeping his sights on transportation as it relates to the city and the region – and how their economies are connected with the rest of the state, the nation and the world.

“We’re moving up in terms of our importance in logistics and transportation,” Norris said, “but if our roads are in disrepair, if we can’t handle the increased capacity in the number of trucks and trains traveling through West Tennessee, then we’re going to lose that opportunity.”