you'll hear remarks from jim kuhn, tom jensen, a vice president at ubs, and several others. this is almost an hour. >> i would ask you all to take your seats and get started. thank you. i will just introduce our moderator for this second portion of our program. i will go ahead and turn it over to you. >> can you all hear me? i will talk while you guys are getting your coffee. after that rousing debate, now we are going to talk about details. i cover transportation for national journal and i have been involved with or watched the ins and outs of congress. we have a group of panelist with a wide variety of perspectives on the transportation debate. i will give you a brief opener and then we will talk about it. we are taking questions from the audience that the folks are collecting and they are giving me some sort of electronic device. we are also tweeting if any of you want to send questions that way. without further ado, let's talk about who we have here. immediately on my right is jim kuhn, chief of staff for the house transportation and infrastructure committee. he has spen

immediately on my right is jim kuhns, the chief of staff of this house infrastructure committee. years on capitol hill. he has seen a lot. we also have -- he also has worked for the boeing company. jim is writing the bill and wants it. next to him as tom jensen, the vice president for transportation policy at ups. that puts him right in the middle of a wide variety of transportation issues, including full commercial fleet managers, ocean shipping, rail, and grass-roots lobbying. in his prior career, he worked for stewart mckinney. next to him, ron kirby, the director of transportation planning for the metropolitan washington council of governments for their represents 18 washington-area local governments and the premier organization for the washington legion. they're involved in long-range planning for highway and transportation systems. ron also directed the program at the urban institute. when i asked him how this debate affects him, he sent me the following e-mail which i can attest to. he said, as customers are the people of the metropolitan region and unfortunately my custome