INVESTING IN AMERICA: Secretary Buttigieg Highlights New Infrastructure Law Program That is Helping Communities Access Historic Funding

Washington, DC – U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg delivered remarks to communities gathered for the Thriving Communities Symposium at the U.S. Department of Transportation headquarters. The Thriving Communities Program helps local communities access the generational levels of investment made possible by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, as well as other federal funding, to bring the projects they need in their communities to life. 

The program provides two years of no-cost, intensive technical assistance to under-resourced and disadvantaged communities to help them identify, develop, and deliver transportation projects to achieve locally-driven economic development, health, environment, mobility, and access goals. 

Secretary’s Buttigieg's remarks were part of the first day of a two-day convening of this year’s cohort of communities and capacity builders, which gathered in Washington, DC to share best practices. 

Below the full transcript of Secretary Buttigieg’s remarks:   

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Department of Transportation’s headquarters. For those of you who have been here from communities across the county and of course to my own USDOT colleagues, thank you, I’m so appreciative of our team, some of whom I’ve just had a change to visit with who have been working on this.

I know we’re here because of the work of the Thriving Communities program. But I want to start by saying a word about where I just was, I came from the FEMA headquarters, the National Response Coordination Center, where teams are working side by side and around the clock addressing the ongoing hurricane response. Both helping communities that are recovering from Hurricane Helene and communities that are now dealing with Hurricane Milton. 

And this is a one-two punch that’s upended so many lives and livelihoods, and it’s going to require the best of America to help our fellow Americans get back on their feet there. 

You should know that President Biden and Vice President Harris are directing an enormous response right now, that has thousands of federal personnel from Virginia through to Florida on the ground to help with recovery efforts both with regard to Helene and Milton.    

Millions of liters of water, millions of meals have been delivered. FEMA is helping families and households apply for assistance and connecting them with additional state, local, federal and voluntary agency resources.   

And the administration as President Biden and the Vice President have promised is going to be there to support these communities for as long as it takes.   

And I think that is a fitting thing to have in mind as we gather here. Because of course supporting communities, staying with them, working across different traditional boundaries both within the federal org chart and between local, state, nonprofit and federal organizations is of course exactly what Thriving Communities is about. It’s exactly why I am so proud of this program and such a big fan of it.

The concept as you know is working side-by-side, hand-in-hand with communities to help unlock the resources that came about through this historic infrastructure law—and make connections that otherwise wouldn’t happen without direct technical assistance. And as Hurricanes Helene and Milton leave behind that trail of destruction, we know there’s more communities will need the support of our new program. And we know that many of the communities in our Thriving Communities family are among those that were directly impacted. 

I’m pleased today to be able to announce that we are directing $3 million from the program to help communities rebuild and recover from recent disasters. And we’re hopeful this will be another measure of the support that the federal government and the Administration intends for the communities that have been affected. 

So, to me as we’re seeing these images of communities hit by extreme weather it’s a renewed urgency and responsibility to build and strengthen the kind of infrastructure that will serve Americans for the next 100 years. Part of what is so extraordinary about this moment is after decades of our infrastructure getting worse each passing year because of failure to invest, we now have a very different trajectory. 

President Biden and Vice President Harris came to office knowing that this country couldn’t go another four years without a real infrastructure plan.

And the result was on November 15, 2021, the President signed the historic infrastructure law that has ushered in an infrastructure decade like we haven’t seen at any time in the last 70 years or more. 

We also know that that’s just step one on making good on the potential of this infrastructure era means making sure resources get to the places where they can do the most good, including those who have been left out of past investments because they did not have the access or the means or the influence to secure resources.   

We’re very conscious of the trap that can arise that it takes money to get money, it takes resources to seek resources, it takes knowledge to get knowledge. And we’re working to cut through that and our commitment to fairness and to leaving no one behind and to delivering for all is part of what brings us together here.  

What is happening through the Thriving Communities program, is part of America’s answer to the fact that too many communities were left out of the support that was invested around the country in previous generations.   

So we’ve got a new program in Thriving Communities that didn’t exist when I arrived this building or when President Biden first arrived in Washington. Two years of no-cost, hands-on assistance and capacity-building for communities that have been over-burdened and under-served, from some of our biggest cities to some of our most rural areas. Helping communities develop solutions for their biggest challenges, helping them apply for funding, and helping them deliver their projects.    

And recognizing that a community’s needs don’t stop at the lines of the federal org chart, we also are helping communities access resources from other federal agencies.  

We don’t expect you to automatically know how to navigate something as complicated as the federal government. I struggle to navigate the complexity of the federal government. And you shouldn’t have to do it alone. And I hope also in the course of this gathering you’ve not only gotten to know so many federal partners and nonprofit partners who are working to help you out, but most of all that you’re getting to know each other. Because the cohesion of the cohort that we’re building, the connections, the chance to compare notes, is I think is one of the best things we can foster. We’re conscious that we’re creating a community of communities that have worked with us and worked with each other through this initiative.  

I’m very pleased to see that of the 64 communities we worked with in our inaugural year, 30 have already won federal funding through our grant programs including Safe Streets and Roads for All and the Rural and Tribal Assistance Program.     

That’s one of the reasons why I’m really excited to be here, and we also know there’s a lot of work to do.  

And I want you to know that I can relate to the experience of a community knocking on the door of this building trying to get support. In fact, coming into this atrium, always gives me flashbacks to how it felt when I first set foot in this building as the mayor of a community that had a per-capita income of about $19,000 when I took office in South Bend, Indiana in 2012. Even though we didn’t have as many resources as a lot of other communities we did have big visions for what our transportation future could look like, but we certainly did not have an in-house federal government relations staff. 

Places like where I grew up and places like where so many of you live and serve can’t afford an army of grant writers and lobbyists and consultants and you shouldn’t have to in order to get help, in order to get support, and in order to get funding, in order to get technical advice. And I know that our experience was emblematic of so many of the places that most needed the help but for that very reason were not well-positioned to get it.    

Meanwhile, over the decades, as the state of American infrastructure was getting worse everywhere, but especially in low-income communities, communities of color, Tribal communities, and rural communities, and it widened the inequality gaps that we’ve been living with even further.    

We knew that with the infrastructure package, we had a once in a lifetime chance to change that trajectory. When you inject a trillion dollars in to the American economy to fix what is broken and mend what needs to be repaired across American infrastructure, from water to internet access to power to the approximately half of that bill that went in to transportation, it creates a historic opportunity to work directly with the communities that know first-hand what your needs are. 

And we we’re there to provide the funding to get these projects off the ground. We very much recognize that the projects, the ideas, the concepts the visions aren’t going to originate in this building. I’m very proud of the work we do here and I’m especially proud of the people who come to work here every day. But I’m also proud of the fact that of the 60,000 projects that we’re supporting through the Biden-Harris infrastructure package, zero out of those 60,000 were invested somewhere in these halls. The ideas don’t come from Washington, but more of the funding should— and now, it is.   

And that’s what this is about. And that’s what my colleagues here are working hand-in-glove with you to make a reality. And yes, we know that you may not come through the door with a fully developed, completely articulated, scoped, engineered, ready-for-construction plan and that’s okay. We are here to help you get things on to the drawing board as well, as off the drawing board and turned into reality. 

I want to share just a few stories from a few of you in this room and some of the partners who I know are watching remotely.   

Let me start with our Reconnecting Communities Program, which is doing exactly what the name suggest. It is reconnecting communities with locally-led visions for things like capping interstates and creating greenspace, new transit lines, or implementing complete streets concepts in dozens and dozens of communities around the United States.    

I know we have Syracuse in the building—there you are. In Syracuse, we’re helping the city and state replace the I-81 Viaduct with a series of boulevards and complete streets that will make it easier and safer for residents to reach jobs, businesses, and schools.   

Let me also lift up the work that so many of you have been doing on roadway safety. You know as a country we rightly are up in arms when there is an incident in commercial aviation where somebody could have gotten hurt. And yet America has been far too tolerant of the reality that 40,000 people die every year on our roadways. It’s a crisis that spares no community—and one that disproportionately affects communities of color, rural communities, Tribal communities, and low-income communities. So we’re doing something about it, and I’m so inspired by the local visions we have been able to fund. 

I think we might have the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes with us today. Here we are. It was so great to be with you out west earlier and I was honored to visit the area of the Flathead Reservation, where we’re helping to add a separated pedestrian path and wildlife crossings to reduce collisions along a dangerous stretch of US-93.    

In York, Alabama, I don’t know if York is with us remotely or in person, but we are working with the community of York with a $3 million grant to plan and design safer crossings where the rail meet the road in a community that is practically encircled by freight rail lines that disrupt everyday life there. 

All of these things are going to make people safer, and we have a long way to go, but we have registered nine consecutive quarters of declining roadway deaths, so we are heading in the right direction to reverse the rise in injuries and fatalities on our roads. 

One last area that I’ll mention, complementing the work we’ve always done on transit, we’ve been getting creative to support the construction of new housing.    

Our Thriving Communities team is working with Cleveland to develop new affordable housing next to transit stops, and helped Syracuse win a $50 million housing grant through the Department of Housing and Urban Development adjacent to our new transportation project.      

There’s more that I could rattle off, but I’m going to stop talking about the projects there.    

What I want to say is that each of those stories is evidence that a focus on fairness, and a readiness to empower communities leading the way on vision—with federal dollars and technical support coming out of this building—is something that works.   

And now is the time to keep going, not to turn back. We’ve awarded billions of dollars to improve infrastructure in 550 rural and Tribal communities that had never even applied for federal transportation dollars before but there are still hundreds if not thousands more communities that still need this support.  

75 percent of our Administration’s clean energy investments since 2022 have been in places with incomes below the average and has created good jobs for so many people but many of those counties also still have incomes below the median.   

You have shown how much can be achieved in a short amount of time, and together we have shown that good federal policy can do big things and deliver the transportation infrastructure that serves everyone. So, I want to express my faith in this program and my gratitude for all of you and your work. 

And I do think it’s fitting that we’re here today with everything going on around the country and around the world with colleagues from around the country who have demonstrated how federal and local partners can work together to solve big problems. Because you live and breath the power of community.    

And that power of community is the kind of strength that’s going to be needed—a shared commitment to helping one another—is a strength that’s very much going to be needed in this country in the days, weeks, and months ahead.    

Anyone who has lived through a natural disaster knows that recovery is a long-term process that demands long-term support. Anyone who has lived through economic upheaval know likewise. That to deal with that you have to be in it for the long haul.  

And what I sense in this group is exactly the right combination of patience and impatience. The patience to understand that it takes a number of steps and processes and conversations and public meetings – how many of you are survivors of many a public meeting, right – that takes patience. But also the kind impatience to say hey just because something has been sitting around needing to be done for 10 or 15 years doesn’t mean we’re going to sit around one day longer waiting to take action. That is the spirit that I sense in this group, that’s what I hope you feel and experience and understand that we are here to help you with. And again, the only thing that I am prouder of than the work that has gone in to this already, is what I know what is to come as I see story after story, example after example, success after success from the communities that you serve.  

So, thank you for everything that you’re doing, thanks for the chance to address you – please keep up the fantastic work.  

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