Remarks from Manchester, NH | Secretary Pete Buttigieg

Good morning. It's such a pleasure to welcome everyone to Manchester. I want to thank Secretary Buttigieg, Senators Shaheen and Hassan, Congresswoman Custer, Congressman Pappas, and Mayor Donchus for joining us this morning. We're about to enter a massive phase of infrastructure development throughout our country. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will improve the quality of lives of Granite Staters by making much needed improvements in our local communities, including right here in Manchester. At one time, this millyard was home to the largest textile manufacturing operation in the world. Over the years, it's transformed from an era of textiles to one of technology, biomedical manufacturing, and higher education. Today, it's a hub of what we're hoping will be a complete revitalization of Manchester's rail and multi-modal infrastructure. It feels as though we're closer than ever to expanding commuter rail to the region, which will allow Manchester to experience new economic development opportunities, attract a youthful workforce, expand public transportation opportunities, and increase accessibility to employment throughout the greater Manchester area. And thanks to Secretary Buttigieg and through the great support of our federal delegation, Manchester was recently awarded a $25 million raise grant to revitalize the South Millyard and South Elm Street corridor of the city. This project will mitigate traffic congestion, provide increased transportation options, including biking and walking trails, a pedestrian bridge over Granite Street, and will create opportunities for development throughout the South Elm Street area. It goes without saying the investment coming into Manchester over the next decade will completely revitalize our community and better the lives of our residents through expanding roadways, improving bridges, developing multi-modal transportation lanes, and investing in rail, and so much more. This is an exciting time for Manchester, and we're ready to get to work. I want to thank everyone again for being here, and it's now my pleasure to introduce Mayor Jim Donchess. Well thank you Mayor Craig, and I want to thank Secretary Buttigieg and our congressional delegation for, and the Biden administration, for helping to bring this huge opportunity, the possibility of this huge opportunity, to southern New Hampshire. We've been working to try to bring commuter rail to Manchester and Nashua for decades now, doing many study projects at the state level, and people really want this. Tens of thousands of people commute south, and if we can bring this rail opportunity to southern New Hampshire, people can get off the road, promote a cleaner environment, happier lives, and for this we, this opportunity, we really, really owe a debt of gratitude to the Secretary. So we're looking forward to working, make this project a reality, bringing jobs, economic opportunity to our state and our communities, and I just want to reiterate again how important that that will be. Now I, now it's my pleasure to introduce a Manchester institution, Congressman Nick, Chris Pappas. Chris has been Executive Counselor, now a member of Congress, a small business owner, and it's just been great to get, get to know him. So good to see you. Well thank you Mayor Donchus, thanks for coming up the river this way to Manchester, and thank you to Mayor Craig, and congratulations on the announcement of this raise grant. I mean, I think this speaks to the leadership that you provide for the city of Manchester, third time's the charm on this thing, I believe, and it's due to, you know, the city and its leaders sharpening their pencils and putting together a really terrific proposal that got the attention of the Department of Transportation and is going to help remake this city for the better. That's what this bipartisan infrastructure bill was born out of. I think a lot of conversations that we had with community members, with constituents in districts like mine, and in my colleagues' districts all across the country. I'm a member of the House Transportation Infrastructure Committee. We've been working for the last several years on getting a major package together to reinvest in this nation's infrastructure, and we know that the cost of doing nothing far exceeds the price tag on this bill. Because what we hear from our mayors, what we hear from businesses in our districts, what we hear from employers and workers and environmental groups, is that we need to rebuild for the future, not just rehabilitate what we've got today. That's what the city of Manchester has put together for a proposal in this raise grant, but there are tremendous opportunities in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that will allow us to think about the kind of future that we can create. You know, for too long we haven't had the resources coming from Washington that are going to make these great local and statewide ideas a reality, but now in New Hampshire we're going to see a 47 percent increase in the amount of money coming to roads and bridges. We're going to see a record amount of money being invested in high-speed broadband, in water infrastructure, in our ports and airports and rail. We just had a great conversation about the potential that bringing rail up the Merrimack Valley will have, not just for Manchester and Nashua, but for the entire state of New Hampshire. So I think this is a great day. This five-year bipartisan infrastructure bill, we're going to begin to see the impacts of it. Shovels will go in the ground really soon on a number of transportation-related projects, and I'm just so grateful that our delegation has done this work alongside the administration to finally get this deal over the finish line. With that, I'll turn it over to my colleague from the House, Annie Custer, for some remarks. Well, thank you so much, Chris, and thank you for your work on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee getting this done. Thank you to Secretary Buttigieg for coming back to New Hampshire. We're delighted to have you. From a rickety old bridge up in North Woodstock, New Hampshire, with President Biden, to this majestic scene of these extraordinary mills, we are celebrating the bipartisan infrastructure bill and just what a difference it's going to make in our lives here in New Hampshire. You know, we're looking at this history where rail ran this city, and it was really extraordinary. A mile of fabric being made every single day, and all of that cotton and wool coming in by rail, and all of that finished product going out by rail. So I feel like we're peering into the future of bringing rail back to New Hampshire, the Capital Corridor Project. We've got, we had this morning, and we have standing here, three mayors, two governors. We've been working on this for a long time, and now is the time. Most, the vast majority of New Hampshire citizens understand this economic vitality that'll come with this, the quality of life issues of being able to get home without being stuck in traffic, and coach Little League, and go to a softball game, and go to the Red Sox with your family by rail without worrying about being stuck in traffic. It's a game changer for both our economy and for our climate. We had a really vicious storm over the weekend with just wild winds, and our colleagues down in Kentucky, God bless them, the incredible tornadoes. The climate has changed. That is impacting our day-to-day life. We've got to reduce carbon pollution, and rail can make a tremendous difference. So I'm so excited about the bill. Chris did a great job going through all of the things that we can invest in with over a billion dollars here in New Hampshire. I want to put in a plug for that quiet infrastructure as well, broadband, child care. We've got a ways to go to get this next bill over the line in the Senate. But with that, I want to introduce Senator Hassan, and thank Senator Hassan and Senator Shaheen for their leadership as well. Well, thank you so much, Representative Custer, and Secretary Buttigieg, welcome back to New Hampshire. Thank you for being here today, and for all of your leadership. And I'd also like to thank my colleagues in the New Hampshire delegation, as well as our two mayors who are here, and all the transportation and business leaders here today. And Secretary Buttigieg, as exciting as it is to welcome you back, the purpose for which we are welcoming you back is even better. In New Hampshire, the promise of innovation and economic growth is seen firsthand in places like the Manchester millyard. And we need to continue providing resources to help this area expand its economic benefits. The starting point for that is infrastructure. That's why I was proud to work with our congressional delegation to advocate in support of Manchester's application for $25 million in federal funding. This new funding will build on the vibrancy of the millyard, making key improvements that will make it easier to get around. That's a win for our local economy, and for the people who live and work here in Manchester. And it follows President Biden signing into law the bipartisan infrastructure package. Infrastructure underlies everything we do. It's how we go to and from work. It's also how we connect with one another. And I know that this law will make a real difference for people in every single corner of our state. The bipartisan infrastructure law will pave the way to help our economy thrive and to outcompete China. And strengthening and modernizing our transportation infrastructure is critical to the success of those efforts. As I worked with Senator Shaheen and our Republican and Democratic colleagues to negotiate this legislation, I focused on key priorities that people, including small business owners in New Hampshire, have been raising for years. We just held a roundtable discussion about one of those priorities, expanding passenger rail. And you've heard previous speakers talk about it, but let's just think about the benefits that passenger rail really has for our state. It's so important, and it's why I worked on provisions in this law that could be used to help connect New Hampshire to Boston by rail. Importantly, passenger rail can help businesses recruit the workers that they need to grow and thrive. It's going to help our tourism economy by bringing more visitors to New Hampshire. And it's going to help our workers and families by helping people get to work faster, reducing congestion on I-93, and reducing wear and tear on highways and on cars. With commuter rail, we can really reimagine what infrastructure and our economy can look like in New Hampshire. So I look forward to working with partners like Secretary Buttigieg as infrastructure investments continue to come directly to New Hampshire. Together, we can ensure that small businesses and families in New Hampshire have the support that they need to thrive. And with that, I want to introduce my colleague and friend and a leader of these infrastructure negotiations, Senator Jeanne Chahine. Thank you. Thank you, Senator Hassan. Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for being here. I am so delighted to join the rest of the New Hampshire Congressional Delegation, Mayors Craig and Donchess, and of course, our wonderful new Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, here in Manchester this morning. Now, I've been talking about the need to invest in infrastructure in New Hampshire since I chaired the Capital Budget Committee in the State Senate back in the 90s. We underinvest in our country. We invest less than Europe. We invest less than India, than China in infrastructure. Until this package, we were investing less than we did in the 60s. We never had a partner at the federal level who was willing to put dollars in in the way that we are going to be able to because of this Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that is providing the biggest investment in infrastructure in my lifetime, and it's historic. We are very fortunate that we have one of the implementers of this act with us this morning because we've seen his vision, his thinking about the future and about New Hampshire. He knows the state, and he's had a chance to meet with our people, and he understands why it's so important to invest. He's a former mayor. He knows that it took Republicans and Democrats working together to get this done. It would not have happened without President Biden and the administration, and it will not get implemented without people like Pete Buttigieg. We are so happy to have the Secretary here this morning to talk about how he's going to continue to support efforts like that of the City of Manchester that have gotten this raise grant. Thank you so much, Mr. Secretary. Thank you so much, Senator Shaheen. Thank you for your leadership in the negotiation of this bill. Thank you to Senator Hassan for your work framing this legislation, including, importantly, the rail dimensions that are historic in their scope. I'm so delighted to be with Representatives Custer and Pappas, who have been such partners and friends in this effort. Mayor Donchess, great to see you. Mayor Craig, I love being in a great river city. People call me Mayor Pete from time to time, and I always take that as a compliment because, of course, mayors continue to be on the absolute front lines of delivering for their people. We want to be the right kind of partner for those local problem solvers. Thanks to the leadership of the people you see behind me and so many others across the country, we were able to see the President sign into law last month that historic bipartisan infrastructure law. I'm so excited to be able to be here in Manchester to discuss what President Biden's vision for building a better America looks like. The law represents a once-in-a-generation investment in infrastructure and in jobs, and together with the President's Build Back Better Act, it will create millions of good-paying jobs and make a tremendous difference in people's lives here in Manchester and around the country. It was a little over two centuries ago that a small rural community called Dairyfield was renamed Manchester, named after one of the first great industrialized cities in the world in the hopes that it might grow and follow a similar path. And that same year marked the founding of the first Amnesty textile mill, from which the Mill Yard area takes its name. So today, of course, we know that Manchester has grown in so many ways, has moved forward in so many ways from its early textile days, and the Mill Yard, as we know it today, has become home to innovative tech firms, to restaurants, to small businesses, and of course to UNH here. But jobs and opportunities are only meaningful if people have access to them. People can get to them quickly, readily, safely, and affordably. And that's one of the reasons we were so pleased to award the City of Manchester this $25 million raise grant to support connecting the South Mill Yard to its surrounding neighborhoods. I can tell you, this was a very, very competitive round of funding. We had about a billion dollars to work with, and about 10 billion dollars of applications coming in. So the ones that got over the line were those that really demonstrated how they were going to make everyday life better in their communities. The funding is going to help create new roadways, new bicycle and pedestrian paths, and make it easier for people to get around no matter how they travel. It's going to make it easier and safer to walk and bike, and reduce traffic and congestion for those who drive. And these are investments that don't just benefit people in Manchester today. They position the city for a future of continued investment in jobs, which is why we look forward to seeing how Manchester will continue to grow through a combination of great transportation and great land use policy and planning. This raise grant is one of the largest that we're awarding this year in our department, but it's just one of the ways that we're investing in jobs and infrastructure in New Hampshire. This state right now, this state alone has over 200 bridges and nearly 700 miles of highway in need of repair. Driving on roads in poor condition creates what I call the invisible pothole tax. It costs the average New Hampshire driver more than 400 dollars a year just in the impact on vehicles. Commutes are getting longer, and those who rely on public transit are spending more than twice as much of their time commuting as those who drive, which is why the president's bipartisan infrastructure law, supported by the folks that you see at my side, is providing to New Hampshire 1.4 billion dollars to improve roads and bridges, 126 million dollars to improve public transportation, including making it more accessible for seniors and people with disabilities, and 15 million dollars that will go to making roads safer so that fewer of our loved ones lose their lives in preventable crashes. It increases the amount of funding available to Department of Transportation grant programs like the raise program that is bringing this new development and support to Manchester, and it makes the largest investment in clean drinking water in U.S. history, including dedicated funding to address PFAS contamination, a provision that was supported, I know, by everybody here and I know is championed by Senator Hassan and is going to be so important for a future generation. It's the largest investment in passenger rail service since Amtrak was set up in the first place, and we just had a terrific conversation with elected leaders, with labor and business leaders, and community leaders about a potential plan to expand rail service from Boston up to Manchester. I'm grateful for everyone who's part of that conversation, and I'll tell you whether it's a new rail proposal or the next grant project that comes along, infrastructure will be so important to the future of this community in this region. And I was especially pleased to see how much local energy there is for these discussions, because the bipartisan infrastructure law provides tremendous opportunity for federal investment. We know that successful projects require local leadership, local planning, and local support, and with that local buy-in, we have an opportunity to create a transformative future here in New England. So that's what we're talking about today, that's what we're investing in right now, and this is what building a better America looks like. We're excited about the new generation of union jobs that will be created, most of which require a lot of skill but do not require a college degree, because this is a blue-collar blueprint for rebuilding our country and our economy. So again, I want to thank everybody here for their support and for the work ahead actually implementing this law and making it a success, which I can tell you my colleagues at the Department of Transportation are enthusiastic about doing. I think we have a little bit of time for questions, which will be quarterbacked by my colleague Danny, and we'll do as much as time allows. Thank you. Well, I'll let them speak to that. I'll say, you know, last time, a few times I was here, it was on political business. This time I'm not. I'm here on official business, but I believe that good policy is good politics, and I believe that at the end of the day, the whole point of campaigning and elections is that if you win them, you get to govern, and we feel the responsibility and the opportunity of delivering for people who have been asking about and talking about infrastructure for decades. We have a chance to actually get it done, and I know that that's part of what it means to make good on the expectations of those who elected us and sent us into these these roles as administration, and I'm sure at every other level, but if anyone else wants to speak to that. Well said. I'll just say my focus continues to be on listening to people of New Hampshire and delivering on the priorities that they talked to me about. I have been hearing from Granite State businesses and families about, for instance, the need for passenger rail or the need to address the PFAS contamination in our groundwater, the need for high-speed internet in every corner of the state. That's what we are working to deliver on with this legislation. It was a bipartisan effort because it also means that the solution that we've crafted is sustainable with support on both sides of the aisle. That's what I continue to focus on, and that's why it's so exciting to be here today. Yeah, and I think this is clearly not about the next election or politics. This is about delivering on the promises that we've all made and the assurance that our communities need that we can come together and solve problems, and I think we should highlight the work that the senators did to negotiate this, the way the administration was involved, but I'll also recognize we wouldn't have got this bill over the finish line in the House were it not for a large majority of Democrats who supported it and Republicans who joined us in that effort, too. So this stuff isn't political. This is basic. This is about what we can do to support our communities, create jobs, and really create the framework for economic success for our country moving forward so that we can be competitive on the world stage. I think that's something that all Americans can get behind, and this is really just about now getting the policy right and implementing it in a way that our communities can fully benefit from it. Just add that this group right here is the Can Do Caucus, and when you're with mayors, when you're with governors, when you're with Mayor Peeg, now Secretary of Transportation, we're going to get it done and we're going to have results to show for it. So what we're finding with the changes in work patterns and commuting patterns is that the ways in which people move around are changing, but the need to move around is not. In some places, we actually saw an increase in people needing to get around just in different ways, and so what we need to do is have visions that are flexible, that don't assume that the next 30 years of commuting are going to look like the last 30 years, but in many regards, I think the forced separations that came about as a result of the pandemic have reminded us just how important personal connections and face-to-face interactions are, and those are important, of course, not just from a commuting perspective, but in terms of access to loved ones, access to health services, and everything else people count on good transportation to make possible. Hard-working families, what we're hearing from right now is families that do not want to spend hours of their day in traffic. They've learned that they want to be home for dinner, they want to be with their kids, and I think that's going to make a difference. They're going to be people who are going to work from home some days and go to work some days, and what we want to offer is the most options to make commuting for work and economic activity work with their family life. Yeah, there's a reason the word jobs is in the name of this bill, and let me say that this is different from 2009. This isn't about short-term stimulus and just making sure we pump as much money into the economy as we can the way it was in 2009. This is a vision that really is taking us through the years to come. In the short term, there is very, very low unemployment, which creates its own challenges in terms of making sure that we're equipping a future workforce to be ready to step up to these jobs that, again, typically don't require a college degree, but they do require skills and training, and we're going to be partnering with organized labor, and we're going to be partnering with community colleges and a lot of other players on the ground to get ready for that. Of course, we don't know one year, three years, five years from now whether we'll continue to be in the exceptionally low period of unemployment that we are now or whether things may look a little different, but what we will know for sure is that not only are construction jobs, building and repairing U.S. infrastructure important and beneficial, but also having good infrastructure supports jobs in every sector and makes it possible to have a stronger economy for all. I'd just add that a bipartisan bill that passed in the Senate in the spring and is now before the House called the USECA, United States Innovation and Competition Act, or the Endless Frontiers Act, includes provisions that would help kind of build on our Running Start program here in New Hampshire, those early college courses that kids can take in high school to prepare them for jobs without needing necessarily to go to college or allow them to decide what kind of workforce training to do next. And then in the next piece of the economic plan that we're working on right now that's aimed at lowering costs like prescription drug costs and the cost of higher education and child care is also aimed at improving workforce development efforts, much more integrated, much more coordinated, getting people more choices after high school to get to work earlier at no or lower cost.