Senator Jay Costa:  Thank you very much, Mr. President.  Mr. President, a lot has been said about Senate Bill 1 and I won’t repeat many of the attributes of this particular piece of legislation.  I rise to lend my support to the efforts to advance this bill from the Senate over to the House.

I would be remiss, however, if I too did not recognize the great efforts of the two chairs of the Senate Transportation Committee, Senator John Rafferty and the work that he did and his staff, as well as Senator John Wozniak and the work that John did and his staff, working in a very bipartisan, cooperative manner to address many of the needs that a number of us who had the opportunity to work with those men to be able to address the needs that we feel are important as it relates to our transportation system in this Commonwealth.

Mr. President, transportation is extremely important.  And today, this day, we are taking a very significant step towards making certain that we do two things in this Commonwealth on two issues that we are very concerned about.

One, the safety of our roads and our bridges and our highways and our ports and our transit issues.  Making certain that we have an appropriate stream of revenue for many, many years to come that provide for resources to provide resources to allow us to make investments in our roads and bridges to address the concerns as it relates to the deficiencies that exist along those lines.

It’s been a number of years, I think it’s been 16 years, since we’ve been in a position where we made investments of this magnitude into our roads and bridges and the like, and we think it’s very important.

And most important and bigger, another issue that’s very important to our caucus has been an issue that Senate Democrats have been talking about for the past several years, and that is job growth and the work that’s being done, and jobs that we grow here in this Commonwealth.

I don’t need to remind the members in this chamber that two years ago, this Commonwealth stood seventh in job growth.  Today, we rank near the bottom of the country, 48th or 49th, depending on what measure you might use.

In March of 2012, we had 6,000 more jobs then than we do today.  The administration has talked about a 100,000-plus new jobs are created, but they fail to recognize that we’ve lost 36,000 in the public sector.

So, Mr. President, while other states around us are making significant progress in jobs and job growth and in fostering an economic climate that grows jobs, we are not.  This legislation puts us on course to be able to generate, over the course of the next handful of years, some 62.5 thousand jobs.  Folks, those aren’t my numbers.  Those are the number from the Secretary of Transportation who says that for every billion dollars of investment, you generate 25,000 jobs in this Commonwealth.

You do the math.  It makes sense.  It’s the right approach.  It’s something that we need to do as a Commonwealth to address those two core issues.  And let me be clear, transportation funding, as it relates to our transit and transportation systems, is a core function of government.

And let me be equally clear.  The growing jobs is a core function of government and things that we need to do.  But most importantly, Mr. President, what we should not be doing.  And when this bill moves out of this chamber in a very strong, bipartisan way, what it should not be when it is received in the House is being a part of a condition that we pass legislation over here in this chamber as it relates to wine and spirits privatization so that this bill gets passed in the House.  This issue is far too important to be tied up, conditioned upon, linked to, somehow coupled with wine and spirits privatization.

My hope is that the effort that’s been put in by these gentlemen who lead our respective transportation committees and did an outstanding job, along with Secretary Schoch, who was an outstanding champion of what needed to be done and his time that he took with our members of our caucus to make certain that he heard our concerns about what needed to be done.

That’s important, and we’re pleased with that.  But at the end of the day, we cannot allow this vehicle, this important transportation bill, to be tied to, linked with, conditioned upon a passage of a piece of legislation here that we can very clearly see, in terms of the things that I’ve heard from members in this chamber, there’s not a clear understanding about what direction we need to go.

We’ve got three weeks remaining.  We need to make sure we get transportation funding done over in the House as well, and get to the Governor’s desk.  And it should not, in my opinion, be tied or linked to or coupled with wine and spirits privatization.

Thank you, Mr. President.