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This story appears in the May 14 print edition of Transport Topics.

House and Senate negotiators assigned to produce a compromise joint highway bill met last week in their only public meeting before slipping behind closed doors to work out issues ranging from funding to construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

The ideological differences be-tween the parties are so deep, however, and the issues so contentious that there are doubts about whether the so-called conference committee can agree on a transportation reauthorization bill.

And whatever comes out of conference committee would still have to be approved by the House and Senate.

“Increasing investment is not in the vocabulary of this Congress,” said former U.S. Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), who used to be chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Oberstar spoke to the National Industrial Transportation League last week and said of the reauthorization process: “I’ve never seen anything this dysfunctional.”

Speaking at the same gathering, American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves echoed Oberstar, saying it was “disconcerting” to see the “inadequate response” by Congress to infrastructure needs such as funding for roads and bridges.

“One of the reasons we’ve had a hard time getting a highway bill is because we have a lot of folks now in Congress who think the federal government should get out of the highway business, and we should devolve responsibility for roads and construction back to the states,” Graves said.

Indeed, House Republicans were so divided over fundamental transportation policies that they could not in January pass the five-year bill introduced by Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), the current chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

The Senate passed a two-year, $109 billion bill in March by a wide bipartisan margin, but House Re-publicans refused to allow a vote on that measure.

As a vehicle to get to conference on the Senate bill, House leaders pushed through a proposed 10th temporary extension of transportation legislation to fund highway projects and public transit through September (4-23, p. 1).

If conferees can agree on the funding in the Senate bill, chances are good for a full reauthorization plan, said Timothy P. Lynch, ATA’s former director of legislative affairs who is now a senior director at Washington law firm Morgan Lewis.

“If they can’t resolve that, then I think they’re back to square one,” Lynch said.

Conferees are not “terribly far apart” on other reauthorization issues, but to produce a bill, House Republican conferees must agree to spending levels closer to those in the Senate bill than many House members want, Lynch said.

House conferees will also have to agree to offsets the Senate found to make up a $12 billion funding gap between current spending levels and revenues available in the Highway Trust Fund, he said.

“I think there was a very smart tactical move made by Speaker [John] Boehner to put all those freshman Republicans on the committee,” Lynch said. “Be-cause if they can agree to a conference report and sign it, then they are going to have to go back and sell it to their fellow freshman Republicans.

“If you didn’t have them in the room negotiating, then you’ve got the proverbial ‘they’re on the outside looking in.’ Now they’re on the inside.”

Oberstar, who participated in the 2005 conference that produced the last full reauthorization bill, which expired in 2009, made light of the conference process.

“Either you say it from the heart, or you read what your staff has printed for you,” he said. “And then they say, ‘We’ve done enough for today, so we’ll go home. And we’ll agree that the staff will continue to talk.’ ”

But the staff can’t make progress when members don’t agree on fundamental policy issues, Oberstar said. The House conferees have a mandate from their leaders to get Mica’s original bill accepted, even though it did not have enough support to pass, Oberstar said.

“They are proposing to ask the Senate conferees to consider a bill that the House hasn’t passed, and for which there are no matching provisions in the Senate bill,” Oberstar said. “That’s a formula for absolute failure.”

Indeed, at the opening meeting, ideological differences among conferees were apparent.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) called the two provisions put forth by Republicans — the Keystone pipeline and scaling back environmental reviews — “poison pills.”

Keystone, which would transport oil from Canada to Texas refineries, is opposed by President Obama and most Senate Democrats.

The Senate bill contains provisions supported by ATA, among them an EOBR mandate for trucks, a drug-and-alcohol clearinghouse for driver records and crashworthiness standards for trucks.

“The bottom line is that the Senate bill contains a range of smart safety improvements with wide bipartisan support here and outside this room,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), chairman of the Commerce Committee, said at the conference committee meeting.

Staff Reporter Timothy Cama contributed to this story.