ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュのBiden, Sen. Mitch McConnell make joint appearance in Kentucky for infrastructure event

Andrew Beshear (00:03):
Not quite one week ago, we learned the Brent Spence Bridge Corridor Project secured one of the largest, if not the largest federal infrastructure awards in history, more than $1.6 billion. This is a green light and a game changer. It impacts our entire country, and this funding is going to allow us to complete this project without tolls.
(00:43)
Building a companion bridge isn’t just the fulfillment of my administration’s promise. It’s also the beginning of an even brighter future for the families of this region, for the tens of thousands of travelers who pass through this area every day, and for the many businesses that rely on this key commercial link, the need could not be greater. The current span, while structurally sound is carrying twice the number of vehicles it was designed to accommodate. For the families who live and work in northern Kentucky and across the river in the greater Cincinnati area, the heavy traffic delays and safety issues are real everyday concerns. This crucial project will address those issues, but the full impact goes to the very health and security of our nation’s economy.
(01:37)
The I-71, I-75 corridor is one of the most important stretches for commercial freight traffic anywhere east of the Mississippi River. Allowing these goods to move smoothly through this metropolitan area and over the Ohio River is critical to sales, supply chains, tourism, and more. So much of our nation’s GDP relies on this crossing and getting this companion bridge built is absolutely essential to keep our economic momentum growing. On top of everything else, this project is going to create thousands of construction jobs right here during the building process.
(02:24)
This project has been talked about for years, decades, really, and we are the folks who are actually getting it done. But a project of this magnitude doesn’t happen without a lot of leadership and a lot of cooperation. First, I want to thank the president for delivering on this historic funding request. Multiple presidents have promised a companion bridge and this president delivered. I want to thank Governor DeWine for his continued friendship and partnership on this and so many other matters where we have shared interest. Last February, governor DeWine and I signed a memorandum of understanding that laid out the next necessary steps for this project, and he and his team continue to work with our folks to get this done.
(03:27)
I want to thank Secretary Pete. I want to thank Kentucky’s Transportation Secretary Jim Gray, as well as his Ohio counterpart, Jack Marsh Banks. I want to thank, yeah, we can clap for them. I want to thank Senator McConnell as well as both senators from Ohio who voted for the Infrastructure Act that made this possible. Senator McConnell, you put Kentucky and the country first with your support, and we are grateful. And I want to thank former Congressman John Yarmouth, who helped push this bill through the house.
(04:14)
I want to thank the Kentucky General Assembly who has many members here and its leadership who allocated 250 million towards this project that allowed us to submit a strong application saying the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the state of Ohio would do our parts. And thanks to local leaders like Covington Mayor, Joe Meyer. This amazing project shows it’s possible and what’s possible when we push partisanship aside. We did this as a team, Democrats and Republicans from the White House to local government. And look what we’ve accomplished. One of the largest infrastructure projects in US history.
(05:07)
60 years ago, the original Brent Spence Bridge was built by Americans who’d been through World War II. Known as the greatest generation, their example helped lead us through the last few years where we faced our own share of adversity. I’m proud of the way Kentuckians and all Americans have come together to face crisis and adversity. And now we see a new day dawning, one defined by prosperity as we reap the rewards of our hard work. A day defined by our capacity to work together for the good of all of our people. This is our moment, the chance to be the generation that changes everything for the people of Kentucky, the people of Ohio, and every single American. God bless. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (06:07):Please welcome Ohio Governor, Mike DeWine.

Mike DeWine (06:21):
What a great day this is, the sun is out, and we’re looking to the future. We’re looking to build this bridge. There’s a lot of people to thank, but let me start with the president. Mr. President, we welcome you back to, I can’t say welcome to Ohio, but I can say you can at least see Ohio from here. But welcome back. We’re glad to have you here. We appreciate your leadership. And although Ohio Governor Beshear and I, our legislatures are been ready to put a lot of money into this bridge, I think we’ll have probably another billion dollars in Ohio and Kentucky will have a lot as well. The truth is this bridge could not be built without these federal dollars. So Mr. President, welcome, welcome back and thank you for that leadership.
(07:26)
Let me thank my friend Mitch McConnell, my mentor when I was in the United States Senate. His leadership made a huge, huge difference. Mitch’s always been someone who can get things done, and he certainly took the lead in getting this done. My friend Rob Portman, former United States Senator, it’s kind of hard to say that former, about Senator Portman, but a true leader in getting this bill passed as well. I want to thank Senator Brown for his work, his leadership on the bill.
(08:06)
And then there’s my partner, Governor Beshear. He and I have sort of navigated through the covid together. We were on the phone with Eric Holcomb, governor of Indiana, I think every single week for over a year. But we also had time to talk about this bridge and how we were going to get it done. And I salute his team. They have done a great, great job. When this bill was passed, we were ready to go, weren’t we, Governor? We were ready to go. And I also want to call out Jim Gray, who heads up the transportation department here in Kentucky. Jack Marsh Banks, who heads it up in Ohio. They have worked together for a number of years to getting ready for this day. The next magical day is January 13th when the RFP will be put out. So we’re rolling. We don’t have too many days to go before we really, really kick this thing off.
(09:08)
I want to thank the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. Throughout the years, good times and bad, when you ask the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, and when you ask the business community, “What’s your number one priority in Cincinnati?” They came back every single time and said, ” This bridge.” They did not falter. They stayed with it. And so I thank them. I thank Joe Meyer who heads up the chamber, and I thank the business community in Cincinnati. Thank you for your persistence and for knowing what was important, not only for Cincinnati, but for this country as well.

(09:52)
My friend, new Mayor Preva. He and I just had a chance to talk a moment ago, but thank you. Thank you for your leadership and your predecessor, John Cranley, it’s mayor of Cincinnati. We have been working very closely with them, the Ohio Department of Transportation. And part of the good news, I think of this story is that the city’s going to have an additional because of this 10 acres, additional 10 acres that they can develop, they can use for the people of the city. We’re working with the city of Cincinnati to make sure that because of the way we’re constructing this and the on-ramps and off ramps and other streets, we’re going to tie the community together and closer together to downtown Cincinnati. And that certainly is going to make a difference as well.
(10:44)
So let’s build this bridge. Let’s get it going. We’re moving forward. We know the economic impact that this bridge has for the country. But let me say also this bridge, a new bridge is going to have a huge impact for Kentucky. It’s going to have a huge impact for the state of Ohio. The timing is right. This is a time in our history when we’re reassuring, when we’re seeing things come back. And one of the lessons we’ve learned over the last few years is we need to make more things in the United States of America. And Ohio is doing that, and Kentucky is doing that, and this bridge is going to facilitate that and make it a lot easier for us to get those products to market and make it go faster. So again, important for the commerce, important for the economic future, and Jobs of Ohio.
(11:39)
But I also like to thank, I’m going to have grandchildren and on and on who are going to cross this bridge. And you’re going to have people coming in, Governor Beshear from Kentucky. They might be coming in to go to a Reds game, a FC Cincinnati game, Bengals game. They might be going to the Aranoff Center. A lot of great things are going to happen with families being able to cross this bridge in a safe and a very effective and efficient way. So let’s go ahead and build this, build our bridge, really our bridge to the future. And I hope that the success that we have seen, this bipartisan support, this Democrats and Republicans coming together. And candidly, we would not be here today without both Democrats and Republicans working together. It simply would not have happened. So let our new bridge serve as an example of how we can come together as a country, come together as a country, as a people to build things and come together as a country together to just get things done. Let’s go build the bridge. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (13:09):Please welcome United States Senator Rob Portman.

Rob Portman (13:24):Well, good morning everybody.

Speaker 2 (13:24):Good morning.

Rob Portman (13:26):
And what an exciting morning it is. Today is the triumph of common sense and persistence over pessimism and partisanship. That’s what this represents. President Biden, I want to thank you for bringing us all together today to celebrate this truly historic accomplishment. It’s also today a demonstration of great teamwork across the river. That doesn’t always happen, but what we’ve seen here with Governor Mike DeWine, who you just heard from,(14:00)… Governor Beshear, who you heard from, but also ODOT Director Jack Marchbanks and Kentucky Transportation Secretary, Jim Gray. I’ve watched these governors and these transportation directors work together closely, come up with their Memorandum of Understanding, and they’ve always been easy to work with, a lot easier when they had some federal money to work with, but they’ve been at this a long time. Today’s also a day that is 30 years in the making. I can tell you that because I represented Cincinnati in the United States House Representatives starting in 1993. And over those 30 years, I’ve spent a lot of time working on the Brent Spence Bridge and we’ve gotten some funding for some parts of it, the environmental impact statement, the engineering, but we could never get the money for construction. So, 30 years is a long time to wait. I guess it took me retiring from the Senate to actually see it, but it is great to be here today after 30 years of working on this.
(14:59)
And by the way, it’s worse now, of course, than it was in 1993. Today they say the I-71-75 junction is the number two bottleneck in the nation. As of today, you look behind me, all those cars and trucks going over, it almost looks like rush hour even though it’s not. But it’s not just the congestion, it’s the safety issue. I remember when the lanes were taken out on the shoulders on the side of the bridge in order to create more room on the bridge, and that obviously creates a huge safety hazard as we saw with regard to some of the terrible accidents that we’ve had. But it’s also carrying more than twice as many cars and trucks as it was ever designed to carry. So it’s a safety issue as well as an economic issue for our region and for the country.
(15:46)
I make a lot of trips across that bridge. I’ve been doing the commute for most of those 30 years a couple times a week, saying my prayers as I cross that bridge being inches away from an 18 wheeler often. And it’s kind of a white knuckle experience for a lot of people who will be happy to see us have another bridge next to it and have this bridge repaired. So it’s been top of mind for me, and I was honored to lead from the Republican side the infrastructure negotiations in Washington. Remember, infrastructure is something that five administrations had talked about and many congresses have talked about. In fact, I think President Biden is not the first president to have a photo op in front of this bridge. In fact, I know there’ve been Republicans and Democrats, I’ve been with them sometimes in front of this bridge saying, “We’re going to get it fixed.” We’re finally going to get it fixed, folks.
(16:44)
The unprecedented level of federal support that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill has provided both through the Bridge Investment Act and through the Mega Program and other programs has given us the ability to finally move forward with this and I’m really excited about it. The Memorandum of Understanding was key to this. And as I said earlier, just the cooperation between the two states is really important. Where it’s going to be particularly important is over the next several years, and for this administration, these two governors, and for their successors and for the future directors and to the workforce that’s going to be involved in this and to our local government officials, today and future over the next decade really, we have to thank them in advance because a lot of the hard work is yet to be done.
(17:35)
I will say today thanks to the support of the Department of Transportation providing this award, it’s about $1.635 billion. That’s the biggest federal grant ever for a project anywhere in the country, anywhere. And it’s appropriate. You got 3% of the nation’s Congress going over that bridge. We’ve probably seen about 1% of it just while you’ve been sitting here. And so I want to thank President Biden, I want to thank Secretary Buttigieg. I want to thank Director Mitch Landrieu, who’s here with us, who heads up their infrastructure project. And I think they understand how critical this is for our nation’s economy and for our region, for the commute. But they also understand that this is a model now for the rest of the country. Our nation has fallen behind a little bit on our competitiveness. We’re not as efficient as we should be and that’s what transportation infrastructure was always about for me, in addition to the digital infrastructure, broadband.
(18:42)
The reason I got so excited about getting something done finally is because this puts America in a stronger position to compete with the rest of the world, and therefore it helps all taxpayers and every American worker. And that’s what this bridge represents too, is this notion that we can, when we put our heads together, get something done that’s that important. I want to especially thank leader Mitch McConnell who showed political courage, I won’t go into great detail on that, but I think you know what I mean, but also patience in working with us. This was a six-month long bipartisan project, started off with one Republican, one Democrat, then we grew it to five and five and 10 and 10, but he helped us steward this through the process and his support for this, in my view, the Infrastructure Bill itself was critically important to our being here today. So Mitch, thank you.
(19:36)
I want to thank Senator Brown as the co-author of what’s called the Bridge Investment Act, which is made part of the Infrastructure Bill that’s providing about 1.3 of this historic $1.6 plus trillion commitment today. And of course, again, to Director Marchbanks and Secretary Gray and the teams, thank you for what you will do going forward. This is really important for our region, but it’s also important for our country and it is a model.
(20:03)
Let me finish with talking about another model. We did something to get this infrastructure bill passed that is too rare in Congress these days, and that is we sat down as Republicans and Democrats and said, “What is our objective? What are we trying to accomplish here? After decades of talking about it, how are we actually going to get infrastructure done?” And we set aside our partisan differences, and although we didn’t agree on every detail of that Infrastructure Bill, we worked as hard as we could to find common ground to get it done. Now to me, this is not just about a bridge between Ohio and Kentucky, this is about a more effective bridge for our country by talking about how we got here, which is through this process of yeah, bipartisanship because it actually works to deliver for the people.
(20:57)So as we celebrate the bridge today as being a more effective way to move people across our two great states, it’s also a day to talk about how we need to more effectively create those bridges to solve big problems in our country. Godspeed to all of you and congratulations.