Buttigieg praises BIL for South Bend infrastructure, employment growth
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
With only a couple of months left in his role as U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg—fondly called “Mayor Pete” by many South Bend natives—returned to the region on Wednesday to talk about the impact of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) in northern Indiana.
Buttigieg toured the IBEW 153 training facility, heard from electrical apprentices and union workers, and spoke with community members in the morning before heading to South Bend International Airport to speak with South Shore Line leaders and catch the train to Chicago in the afternoon.
Also known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the BIL has awarded funds to more than 66,000 projects, with project completion spanning decades, Buttigieg said it was important to make this stop to encourage and speak to future building trades workers.
“Much of what President Biden has been trying to do is create a new generation of work and opportunity through the infrastructure work we’ve been doing and the industrial strategy that has led to things like the Amazon facility, the EV facilities, that are going up across Indiana,” he said. “When I became mayor, we were scrambling to figure out how to come up with enough jobs to keep our skilled workforce busy. Now we have the opposite problem…figuring out how to line up the talent to do the work that’s been created with all of the projects that are going on.”
Buttigieg speaks about the importance of building trades skills in executing projects awarded under the BIL, as well as the growth South Bend has experienced.
Since 2021, the state has been awarded more than $7.3 billion for over 2,700 transportation and infrastructure projects under the BIL. Private investments of more than $34 billion have also come into Indiana communities under the Investing in America agenda.
In May, Claus Sauter, CEO of Verbio—the company that took over the South Bend Ethanol Plant—credited Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act for fast tracking the company’s $230 million investment into the local facility.
South Bend International Airport was awarded $1.8 million to restore 8,500 feet of dilapidated taxiway pavement in April and the South Shore Line commuter rail line received $197 million to partly fund its Double Track project that was completed earlier this year.
“This has been a transformative package for the whole country, and that’s certainly true for northern Indiana,” Buttigieg said. “The one thing I’m looking forward to today is riding on the South Shore Line, because federal funding that spans across administrations made it possible for there to be faster travel time.”
With the completion of its Double Track project in May, the commuter rail line now offers trains to Millennium Station in Chicago in under two hours, saving working Hoosiers almost 30 minutes in transit. Now, that time could get even shorter.
After almost three years of negotiations, the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District (NICTD), has acquired an easement on the airport’s west side, providing a shorter, more direct route into South Bend International Airport.
NICTD President Mike Noland hopes to access funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Surface Transportation Act to execute the project that could possibly see a further reduction of up to 15 minutes in travel time.
“There’s always a lot of competition for these funds, but certainly [SSL has] demonstrated that they can deliver great projects with federal dollars,” Buttigieg said. “I’m excited to see what they do next, because shortening that travel time between South Bend and Chicago unlocks an enormous amount of potential and economic opportunity here in this region.”
With the BIL created to provide funding through 2026, Buttigieg said that awards made in January would be administered by the incoming Secretary of Transportation. He also expressed hopes that the new government would acknowledge and continue the generational impact of the law.
“The funding and the work has to go on because they’re so important to the communities that develop these projects,” he added. “These are projects that communities, cities, states, transit agencies, and airports brought forward. We’ve been able to say yes, thanks to President Biden’s infrastructure package.”
Buttigieg added that Biden’s industrial strategy had also benefitted low income and tribal communities that have been asked to do so much with so little. Several communities facing higher rates of crash fatalities due to poor infrastructure have accessed funds to make their roads safer.
The workforce development that has happened as a result of the various investments is what Buttigieg is most proud of. Recalling his time as mayor, he said that he would never have been able to imagine the growth that the building trades industry is currently experiencing, providing meaningful jobs for people in the communities where they live.
“Dramatic expansion in the use of local hire provisions to encourage the development of local business and participation by businesses that may have felt excluded in previous generations of infrastructure funding has been a major focus for us,” he said. “There have been some attempts to undercut this strategy, but we believe in it, and we know that it’s creating opportunity, both in the direct federal contracting that we do, and in the projects we fund.”
Joseph Gambill, training director at the IBEW 153, said that the school was experiencing tremendous growth in the number of students that enrolled annually. The fifth-year apprentice class has only 12 students while the first year class has over 100 students, adding that the school is also 12% female.
Gambill said that when Buttigieg was mayor, the training facility had around 130 apprentices in total. Now that number has doubled to 268. By 2026, Gambill projects that the number of apprentices would exceed 500.
“We’ve certainly already seen a lot of funding come this way, but we’re always on the lookout for more applications, for more projects,” Buttigieg said. “We can’t fund every single project, but I would love to see more done to take everything from highways to passenger rail to the next level in this region. And I think it can be done.”
Congressman Rudy Yakym, representing Indiana’s 2nd District, sent a letter to Buttigieg in November expressing disappointment over the slow pace of executing Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) grant agreements and the lack of information tracking agreement execution for other programs under the BIL, including the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program.
The city of South Bend was awarded a $2.4 million RAISE grant in August 2022 to fund planning and engineering work to remove the antiquated cloverleaf interchanges on the Eddy Street Bridge. Officials only held an initial informational meeting this month to share study plans and welcome public input.
Buttigieg did not address grant execution speed at the meeting on Wednesday, but he expressed the desire of the Biden administration to award grants to as many projects before the Trump administration takes office.
“Not because the administration is ending, but just because we’ve known from day one that we have to act with urgency to get this done,” Buttigieg said. “It will fall to the new administration to carry things forward. It is my hope that ideology and partisanship will not pollute the importance and the unity that we ought to have around getting big things done”