Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg won’t tip hand on Broward’s tunnel vs. bridge fight

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Monday he was aware of the great bridge vs. tunnel debate created by visions of a new South Florida commuter rail service, but declined to take sides on the dispute that has deeply divided local elected officials.

“I don’t want to prejudge any particular case and want to emphasize that many of these policy calls are largely not federal. But what I will say is that we really look for a level of alignment and, to the extent possible, want the different players to get on the same page,” he said in an interview in Fort Lauderdale.

“It’s not easy, but everything goes better when we have all of the different players aligned to make a vision real,” Buttigieg said, adding that “it can take years, sometimes, for that to come about.”

The issue concerns planned commuter rail service that would operate on the Florida East Coast Railway tracks, and require a train crossing at the New River in downtown Fort Lauderdale, partly funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government.

Broward County Commissioners and three of five Fort Lauderdale commissioners prefer a bridge, arguing it would be cheaper and completed more quickly.

Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis and another city commissioner favor a tunnel under the river, arguing that a bridge high enough to meet the needs of a rail line and river traffic would damage the community by erecting an enormous physical barrier dividing the east and the west.

Buttigieg said he didn’t “have all the ins and outs” of the issue, emphasizing that “a lot of this is shaped by local and state decision-making. What we try to do is make sure that the funding is there so that whichever vision ultimately prevails, there are the resources to actually make it happen.”

He also said Trantalis has raised the issue with him. “I know it’s on his mind and he’s somebody I speak to often.”

Trantalis has a long political and governmental relationship with Buttigieg. Trantalis was the most prominent Broward supporter of Buttigieg’s unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign and when parts of Fort Lauderdale were inundated in last April’s floods, forcing closure of the airport, Buttigieg immediately reached out to the mayor to see how his agency could help.

“He’s somebody I’ve known for years and really respect the job that he’s doing,” Buttigieg said. “He’s somebody who I know is very focused on helping this community grow effectively. The kind of growth you have here, many mayors would consider it a good problem to have, but it still creates a lot of challenges including on affordability and infrastructure.”

Buttigieg discussed a range of issues in an interview in Fort Lauderdale with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, and later delivered an address to the International Union of Operating Engineers, which was holding its annual winter meeting in Fort Lauderdale.

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Spirit

Buttigieg wouldn’t say if he’s concerned about the future of Spirit Airways, which is headquartered in Miramar and has thousands of South Florida employees.

Spirit is under immense financial pressure, especially after a federal judge last week blocked its takeover by JetBlue Airways. Some financial analysts have questioned its ability to stay in business without bankruptcy — a path the airline said last week it isn’t taking.

“They need to chart a way forward that is going to work for them as a business and is going to work for passengers. Our focus is on protecting passengers, making sure there’s fair competition, and most important of all, safety. We don’t root for one business over another,” Buttigieg said.

“We root for a healthy American aviation sector. … But within that we’re not picking favorites in terms of the airline sector. I will say we want there to be more, not fewer airlines right now because we’ve seen an enormous amount of consolidation,” he said.

The current big four airlines, which don’t include Spirit, “have enormous market share, which is one of the reasons why we’ve been very concerned about further consolidation and concentration in that industry.”

DeSantis

Buttigieg was in Fort Lauderdale on government business, and he wouldn’t directly address why he thinks Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign for the Republican presidential nomination failed.

Still, he said, “regardless of what party you’re in, I just think there’s more people interested in building bridges than banning books.”

Does Buttigieg — who was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 — have sympathy for DeSantis?

“Look as a human, I know exactly what it’s like to end a presidential campaign after everything you poured into that, all of your supporters, the people you’ve gotten to know along the way. And if his experience is anything like mine, just the need to catch up on rest because it takes everything. I mean, you just have nothing left after something like that.”

Freed from presidential campaign pressure, Buttigieg said he hopes DeSantis is now willing to take advantage of federal programs that would aid Floridians, something other Republican governors have done, instead of rejecting the money.

The DeSantis administration last year rejected $320 million in federal money to cut down on exhaust emissions from cars and trucks, including expanded parking spaces for semi trailers at rest stops. Besides reducing emissions, Buttigieg said that would bolster the nation’s supply train.

Florida was the only state to turn down the funding.

“Unfortunately, people in Florida will be worse off because the governor has decided for political reasons to reject that funding as he’s done with things like Medicaid and funding to deal with child hunger,” Buttigieg said. He said he’d like “the governor to work with us and not against us on this because our goal is for people in every part of the country, red, blue and purple, to benefit from these dollars. Those dollars are better spent here on the ground in Florida than being sent back to Washington because of politics.”

Maybe, he said, DeSantis might now return his phone calls, something he doesn’t recall happening in the three years that he’s been transportation secretary and DeSantis has been governor. The distance “is unusual even among Republican governors because transportation is a relatively nonpartisan field.”

Pride flag

Buttigieg, the first openly LGBT person confirmed to lead a federal Cabinet agency, said the Florida Legislature has better things to do with its time than pursuing legislation to ban display of LGBTQ flags in government buildings.

Rainbow and other flags would be prohibited under legislation advanced last week by House Republicans; flags of what the sponsor called a “recognized nation” would be allowed.

“The Legislature has better things to do than restricting that kind of speech,” he said. “As long as there have been people who are different, there have been government officials telling them that they should be more like everyone else. That’s been true for millennia. But Florida’s got insurance problems, affordability problems, infrastructure challenges and a whole lot of other things that require good work by elected leaders working in good faith and that they just have better things to do.”

Touting Biden

Part of Buttigieg’s mission Monday was touting the work that’s resulting from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in the first year of President Joe Biden’s administration. He said 2024 would be a “year of building.”

Half the $1.2 trillion law involves transportation, he said. “We’re actually starting to see the dirt fly.”

Speaking to about 400 people at the operating engineers’ winter meeting, Buttigieg touted Biden, the infrastructure law, the nation’s low unemployment rate, and health initiatives such as cutting the cost of insulin for seniors, allowing people to buy hearing aids over the counter, and authorizing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices.

He said the administration is “the most pro-worker and pro-union in modern times” and is focused on “making everyday life better, stronger, safer and easier” and “empowering regular Americans and workers.”

“We’re holding the line on anyone who wants to use the latest culture war to change the subject or to divide workers against each other while they laugh all the way to the bank,” he said.

The operating engineers union has about 408,000 members nationwide and includes people who operate heavy equipment at construction sites and people who keep the systems of existing buildings running.

Alex Kolbasowski, business agent for the union local 825 in New Jersey, liked Buttigieg’s speech so much he spent part of the time texting highlights to his colleagues back home. “He’s speaking our language … exactly what we needed to hear” on infrastructure and labor issues.

Though New Jersey is heavily Democratic, Kolbasowski said in the union “we do have a lot of supporters of (former President Donald) Trump. It’s been difficult to get the word out.”

Though Buttigieg is secretary of transportation, he’s not immune to the vagaries of South Florida traffic.

After he left the Harbor Beach Marriott, Buttigieg’s car headed north on State Road A1A — straight into the traffic snarl south of Las Olas Boulevard as two lanes of traffic narrow to one as work continues on a large streetscape project.

This report includes information from Sun Sentinel archives.

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Post.news.