When the U.S. House rolled out an initial summary of its recovery package last week, transit advocates at the state and national level were closely monitoring the amount of resources the feds planned to devote to green transportation initiatives.

Illinois PIRG had previously called on the Illinois Department of Transportation to release the “ready-to-go” project list it had submitted to Congress, hoping to pressure state officials to consider funding rail and bus projects instead of new or wider highways. “There’s got to be a lot of transparency,” Illinois PIRG's Brian Imus told the Community Media Workshop, “and it needs to be focused on long-term goals, reducing traffic congestion, reducing oil dependence, reducing carbon emissions.”

Imus couldn’t have been too pleased with the draft summary that surfaced on Thursday. Despite massive need among public transportation agencies nationwide, the spending on mass transit had fallen significantly from the proposal outlined days earlier by House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair James Oberstar (D-Minn.). Grist’s Kate Sheppard has the details on the cuts and who is responsible:

Oberstar had called for $30 billion for roads and bridges and $17 billion for mass transit, which would give mass transit 36 percent of all the transportation funding in the stimulus package. But in the plan unveiled yesterday, while the road money stayed the same, the transportation portion was reduced by 25 percent, which includes cutting operation assistance funds entirely. As for rail, for which Oberstar wanted $5 billion, its funding was reduced to $1.1 billion—a 78 percent cut.

Oberstar’s office says the cuts were the product of the House speaker’s office, the Senate majority leader, and the Obama transition team.

Transit activists responded with appropriate disgust. Transportation For America said the House proposal “fails to move America forward in reducing our oil dependency, creating opportunity for all Americans, and making us competitive for the 21st Century economy” while the NRDC said “the transportation component of the stimulus package under-funds mass transit in deference to highways and bridges.”

And Sheppard took aim at the “shovel-ready” defense:

Those who favor spending on roads and bridges like to argue that these projects can provide faster stimulus than others because they’re “shovel-ready.” But there are billions of dollars worth of transit projects already queued up too.

In fact, there’s at least $50 billion worth of backlogged repair needs for public transit systems, compared to just $8.5 billion needed to maintain current road systems. And yet the current stimulus bill gives $30 billion to roads, meaning much of the money will be spent on expanding roads or building new ones.

Meanwhile, incoming Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was prepared to speak tonight at the Illinois State Society’s Inaugural Gala -- a lobbyist-funded event -- before the Obama transition reined him in.

Not good signs for those hoping the incoming adminstration would see 2009 as a unique opportunity to restructure our transportation priorities on the national level. It's hard to imagine that the impending congressional negotiations will result in a final bill with more transit spending, but we'll be watching closely nonetheless.

Image used under a Creative Commons license by Flickr user ajacs.