U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg Highlights Jobs Created, Far-Reaching Impacts of President Biden’s Infrastructure Law – “The Big Deal” – at City Club of Cleveland Forum

CLEVELAND, OH – This week, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, to provide remarks and participate in a fireside chat at a City Club of Cleveland forum held at the historic Mimi Ohio Theatre. Secretary Pete discussed how the Biden-Harris Administration has laid the groundwork for the most positive and ambitious economic transformation of his lifetime — one that returns jobs and advanced manufacturing to U.S. soil, respects the dignity of the skilled trades and brings back vitality to cities and towns across the country — including where he grew up in Indiana and where he lives now in Michigan — and that will continue to rebuild and modernize every aspect of our transportation infrastructure for decades to come. 

See the full transcript of Secretary Pete’s remarks below: 

Thank you, thank you. Thanks for such a warm welcome. And a big thank you to Mayor Bibb, my fellow mayor. Somebody I've gotten to know very well through our work.

Thank you to the City Club of Cleveland both for hosting me when I was an obscure Indiana mayor and for having us here tonight, I'm so pleased to be here.

I feel very at home here. Partly because it's a wonderful warm welcome. Partly because I'm a creature of the Great Lakes. I grew up in northern Indiana. My first real job was in Chicago. I married a Michigander. I went to school in Wisconsin. We make our home in Traverse City, Michigan, which is about four hours north of where I grew up. And where I grew up is about four hours west of where we are today.

Another reason I'm pleased to be here today is this is a city, you know this, but this is a city that screams infrastructure. It's just a transportation city. You named your baseball team after a feature of one of your bridges. And by the way, if you stand next to the Guardians on that bridge, as I once did, and you look out, you see – you literally see a picture of American supply chains. The trains, the trucks, and boats coming into the inner waterfront, one for which the mayor and the community have such a compelling vision, which we are proud to be supporting with the $60 million for that effort. And there is so much more good work ahead.

With your position on the Great Lakes and the Turnpike and for so many other reasons, you don't need to be reminded or persuaded about how important transportation is. So, with just six weeks remaining in our Administration, I appreciated the chance to join you tonight and share some thoughts on the work that we've done and on what it is going to mean in the coming years.

The bottom line is, we have taken action to leave every form of American transportation better than when we found it. Not because we love transportation for its own sake, but in the name of the people who are better off for this effort. Whether it is railroad workers who did not have sick leave when we got here and now do.

Or whether it's airline passengers who lacked protections when we got here a few years ago and now do. Or most importantly of all, people who are home with their families tonight because they did not become statistics as we began to reverse the rise of roadway deaths in this country – with a long way to go, I must say.

And, of course, the workers whose entire life trajectories are being transformed because of the jobs we’re creating with these 66,000 projects and counting that we are funding. And the best part of all of this is that these are just the early stages of the benefits that are going to continue to mount over the course of this decade.

And, of course, I will argue that these actions and their benefits deserve continued bipartisan support. No matter who is in charge in Washington.

I started my day in Michigan. We had a visit to UAW’s local 600 in Dearborn. I toured that historic Union Hall, spoke with workers, heard about the jobs that are underway and the work that is coming to their members.

I was in Monroe County to see where federal dollars are helping to replace the River Raisin Bridge between Detroit and Toledo. This bridge is part of two distinguished lists. It's one of the most economically significant bridges in the country, meaning it's a vital connection to jobs and schools and for supply chains. And while it's on our list of the 18 most economically significant bridges we’re supporting, it's also on our list of the 11,400 bridges that we are now funding repairs, replacements, or improvements to around the country.

60,000 plus vehicles drive on that bridge every day. Millions of trucks cross it a year. Traffic is a huge problem. It’s in poor condition and would soon go critical if it weren't for this funding.

It's just one example of places we're working at across the country, including back where I grew up, in Saint Joe County, Indiana, where a multi-billion-dollar GM EV battery plant is under construction. I sat down with electricians and apprentices there last week who told me about the work that they're going to be doing. They told me that 38 projects that they're working on just in that one local [IBEW 153] alone are happening in some way because of the Biden-Harris Administration’s policies.

These last three, four years have brought levels of factory construction and infrastructure Investment that would have seemed laughably optimistic if I had stood in front of this audience 10 years ago, or even five years ago – and I did stand in front of this audience! – and if I were to go around promising them.

It wasn't that long ago, growing up in South Bend, that I repeatedly absorbed the message that jobs and manufacturing, the building trades were long-gone and were not going to come back. The idea that the only way to get ahead was to get out.

I know a lot of people in and around Cuyahoga County grew up hearing that same message. When I became mayor in 2012, unemployment was in double digits, per capita personal income in our community was barely over $18,000 per person. We got the city growing again, but we still waited for help from Washington as empty promises of infrastructure funding came and went.

We put an end to the emptiness of those promises in 2021, when President Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Of course, our first order of business was confronting the pandemic, something that even now I think is dangerously easy to forget how quickly it all changed. Because when we got here, that pandemic was still in the midst of causing the most profound and widespread set of societal and transportation disruptions since 9/11.

And we were confronting decades of underinvestment in our infrastructure. Decades of what amounted to a failed consensus that held sway in boardrooms and in Washington alike. That had laid waste to domestic manufacturing, especially in the industrial Midwest.

While the pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains, it unleashed the global inflation that we've only recently brought back to normal levels. So much of what we faced really was decades in the making, as well as the result of the crises of the moment.

President Biden came in with a clear-eyed recognition that we needed to act quickly and boldly. And I'm proud to have played a part in what came next. It's now been three years since President Biden signed that infrastructure package, the biggest in 70 years. And soon, it was followed by the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act, and the result is all of those projects moving forward in every state in the union.

Just in the Midwest, as I mentioned, we're rebuilding the River Raisin Bridge. All the cars and trucks that pass across that bridge, and so many like it, will finally have a means of passage that reflects life in the 21st century. We awarded $130 million to RTA to replace their fleet of rail cars for the Rapid.

Those rail cars were made it in 1982. So was I, by the way. So, it's about time to do something about that, I guess.

And, as I mentioned, in partnership with Mayor Bibb, a nearly $60 million award to transform the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway from a limited access highway to a pedestrian-friendly boulevard that will expand access to the lakefront and the near the West Side. And $27 million going toward the modernization of the Port of Cleveland, which also just received nearly $95 million from the EPA made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act, to make the port more sustainable and reliable and more efficient.

If I were to visit a couple of these projects every day for the rest of my life, I would not live long enough perhaps to see half of them. That's how much we're doing. And many of them are going to take years to complete. But even before we're all benefiting from the finished product, the very process of building them is changing lives.

Those building trades members who had been told to give up just a few years ago are now bursting at the seams, getting work opportunities and getting the kind of respect that will propel and motivate an entire generation of workers to proudly build America and make a good living as they do it.

Since we got here, more than 1.6 million manufacturing and construction jobs were created. So many of those are good paying, union jobs.

So, the three pillars of the President's agenda to invest in America – the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Chips and Science Act – are such a collectively big deal that I believe – in the tradition of the New Deal, the Square Deal, and the Fair Deal of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman – this ought to be known as The Big Deal, because it's a big deal.

Our infrastructure policy and our industrial strategy has yielded a decisive answer to the question that everybody was wringing their hands over back when I became mayor, which is whether we could, in fact, have a future of making things in this country.

Now, so many of the factories that are being built around the country today will be open in 2025, 2026, 2027. There are hundreds currently under construction. In Sheffield, Ohio, in Lansing, and Glendale, Kentucky, and more.

It's not just because of the funding. It's also a matter of policy.

In this Administration, for example, we are committed to actually upholding the Buy American Laws that say, if you're spending taxpayer dollars, they ought to be used to buy products made here in America. Like those new rail cars for RTA, manufactured domestically, or the steel being used in all this infrastructure made in places like the Cleveland Cliffs facility I saw in Toledo, or another one I saw in Steelton, Pennsylvania.

And those jobs mean we’re not just building roads and bridges and highways and airports and ports, we’re building livelihoods. It means presents under the tree, it means a new car or truck in the driveway, the chance to own a home. They mean, in short, that the middle class is growing instead of shrinking.

And, just as importantly, for those of us who come from communities in the industrial Midwest, they mean that you don't have to leave your hometown in order to build your future.

That is what becomes possible when we recognize the scale of our challenges and bring an even greater scale of ambition to confronting them. And, importantly, breaking the old false choices that were served up to us in the past and that held us back.

One false choice was that you could either support sustainability and the environment or you could support the economy and jobs, but not both. Tell that to the 500 union electrical workers in South Bend who will be working on that GM EV battery factory project before it's even finished. Or the hundreds of auto workers who will be working inside when it's finished.

Another false choice is that you could either do right by workers and support unions or you could have profitable companies and economic growth, but not both. Tell that to the workers in this country getting historic raises while their employers continue to post remarkable profits.

Just in the transportation sector where I work, rail workers are getting raises and sick leave. Port workers are getting increased pay. Warehouse workers, truck drivers, aviation workers, and auto workers – through the power of collective bargaining – are earning historic wage increases and benefits and protections that they ought to have had long ago. And the industries are doing just fine. Better than fine.

Another false choice we were fed was we could either have the industries of our traditional past or we could look to the future. Just like wage rises and company success have been traveling together, so have job growth in traditional industries with industries that didn't even exist when the railroads and the ports and the original factories around here were being built. That battery plant I keep talking about in northern Indiana is right near an Amazon Web Services data center that just broke ground, creating hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of jobs for the building trades.

Here in Ohio, of course, there's the Intel semiconductor facility nearing completion in Columbus at the same time as an EV battery manufacturing plant is coming to Jeffersonville.

And then there were the people who warned, in another false choice, that any effort to close or confront America's racial wealth gaps or gender gaps would come at the expense of every other group of workers. As if that was zero sum.

We have delivered the lowest Black unemployment rate on record. The lowest Latino unemployment rate on record. And the highest working-age women labor force participation rate on record.

Not by taking anything from anyone, but by encouraging common-sense fairness and common-sense steps, like making childcare available at work sites so that more women can enter construction jobs and make great money when they do – and bring their talent to this national project of rebuilding American infrastructure.

My point is that lots of people are better off, and no one is worse off, because that's happening.

Some warned us that government action to protect consumers would cause irreparable harm to business or even somehow to consumers themselves.

But we're wrapping up one of the most pro-consumer Administrations in generations, and corporations are doing just fine.

For example, we created new protections to ensure airline passengers were guaranteed automatic cash refunds when their flight was seriously delayed or canceled and they didn't want to be rebooked. So, you didn't have to fight your airline in order to get your money back.

We reinvigorated our oversight of the airline industry and held airlines accountable. And the results are, over the last two years, we 've seen some of the lowest cancellation rates in a decade and a record number of American passengers flying.

There is so much opportunity to continue good policy and good investments in American infrastructure – and in our future.

We're going to need leadership at the local level, as well as the state level, as well as the federal level, that is focused on supporting and empowering, not dividing and distracting Americans.

The industrial Midwest has been reminded, sometimes in the cruelest of terms, that a national rising tide doesn't automatically lift all boats. It's not the way that they told us in the days of early automation, in the trade deals that were going on when I was a kid.

But today, the industrial Midwest is also showing the country and the world how the right kind of intentional and ambitious growth can lift up a region once told it was dying and power the whole country's growth as we do.

I'm not saying everything is always a win-win. We do have to make choices sometimes. And in those cases, this Administration has been unapologetic about our choices. A choice to do it right, versus to do it overnight. To make it in America, versus to make it as cheaply as possible. To prioritize workers and consumers over short-term profitability. But in making those choices, we have shown that more often than not, with the right policy, everyone comes out better than before.

Now, the work is far from done. Every Administration leaves with unfinished business. And anyone in a job like mine knows that somebody else will cut the ribbons on some of what you started building.

But this isn't the work of one Secretary, or one President, or one Administration. It is the work of a generation.

So much will depend on what we, the generations now in positions of responsibility, choose to do in this moment. Because we collectively will choose whether the progress of these last few years will be developed or whether it will be destroyed. If we get it right, we will have a good answer to give our children who will undoubtedly ask us exactly what we all were doing back in the 2020s when so much seemed so uncertain.

So, my goal is this. When I was a kid, growing up among collapsing factories from decades past in my neighborhood and on my way to school, I had to really listen to those stories from the old-timers and use my imagination. Imagine hard – to picture what it was like when the downtown was bustling with pedestrians and our factories were heaving with workers and our neighborhoods were flush with prosperity. It really took imagination to picture that prosperity of the past – and then it took a lot of imagination for our generation to picture the prosperity we could build for the future.

So, the goal is that by the time my kids, who are now three years old – my son and daughter – are old enough to think about things like history and industry and wealth and poverty, I want them to have the opposite challenge. I want them to have to struggle, really struggle, really reach into their imagination, to imagine what it would have been like when factory workers were being laid off by the thousands. When someone would hesitate to sign up for an apprenticeship program for fear of finding work when they completed.

When people questioned whether our nation could ever be a manufacturing powerhouse. When you would come to a once thriving downtown and find just about nothing going on there after 5 PM. I want it to take enormous powers of visualization to picture how our factories and our downtowns and our training programs could possibly have once been empty. And even though, at least based on how potty training is going, it's going to be happening sooner than I think that I'm getting those questions.

I'm encouraged, because I think we're more than halfway there. I think about where we started. If I think about what it was like when I was growing up and where we have come today, I think we are more than halfway there, which is good, because we may not have a lot of time.

Thank you so much for the chance to address you tonight.

I will take my seat and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Thank you.