mr. john greuling. mr. greuling is a board member of the coalition for america's gateways and trade corridors. welcome, sir. >> thank you mohammad chairwoman, members of the subcommittee. thank you for this opportunity. today i'm representing both the will county center for economic development and the coalition for america's gateways and trade corridors, which is a diverse group of 16 public and private organizations dedicated to increasing federal investment in america's multimodal freight infrastructure. i'm also here as the ceo of the will county center for economic development. our responsibility today is marketing the largest inland international container port in north america. will county is crossed by six class 1 railroads, five interstate highways, several commercial water ports on our nation's largest inland waterway. last year we processed over 3 million containers containing $65 billion worth of goods that are grown, manufactured, assembled, and delivered throughout the united states and the wor

mr. greuling, what are your thoughts? you're somewhat of an expert on this issue. >> senator i think that we suffer from jurisdictionalitis with three four, five different governmental units controlling the infrastructure, the federal government has this same issue. the agencies they have to touch the time it takes to go through the nepa process the environmental review. in fact, i would comment that we have actually seen some improvement on that under leadership from congress and the administration. and we applaud that. it shouldn't take 10, 12 years to do an eis statement on a bridge. clearly that is an issue. so multiple agencies maybe working a little closer together on collaboration and, again, we think a national freight office could help sort of quarterback that initiative especially for these major important freight projects. >> i think what's highlighted today in some of the testimony is what's happened with these choke points on our west coast ports allowing more optionality and so forth when they come up. if we

mr. greuling. anybody else who wants to jump in on that. >> certainly we support anything to make our ports more competitive. we're excited about the working together of seattle and tacoma so we will certainly stand together to work with them. we believe that the tiger grants were a good thing, that we need more funding around those kinds of issues and so from our perspective, anything we can do to make them more competitive we're certainly in favor of that as well. >> senator, certainly our four points with the coalition that number one is to establish a fully funded dedicated freight program, and we believe that that needs to be at least $2 billion a year. and this is not a program that's going to pick winners and losers in the transportation field. this money should be spent on what makes the most economic sense in terms of performance for the entire system. and we believe that setting priorities on a national scale for the projects of national regional significance is one of the mechanisms to d

mr. john greuling. mr. greuling is a board member of the coalition for america's gateways and trade corridors. welcome, sir. >> thank you mohammad chairwoman, members of the subcommittee. thank you for this opportunity. today i'm representing both the will county center for economic development and the coalition for america's gateways and trade corridors, which is a diverse group of 16 public and private organizations dedicated to increasing federal investment in america's multimodal freight infrastructure. i'm also here as the ceo of the will county center for economic development. our responsibility today is marketing the largest inland