House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) was optimistic yesterday about the outcome of the behind-the-scenes battle being waged over a provision to double spending on port and harbor maintenance that many coastal lawmakers want added to the $260 billion transportation bill.

Mica said he had "a strategy" that he believed would be successful to insert the measure but declined to elaborate.

"I won't give away my secrets," Mica said. "We have strong support for this."

At issue is a bill (H.R. 104) introduced by Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.), with 169 bipartisan co-sponsors, that would essentially force Congress to spend the full proceeds of a tax on imported goods meant to fund harbor maintenance dredging for its intended purpose.

Currently, only about half of what's collected, about $750 million annually, gets spent on dredging. In a annually recurring, decade-old budgetary gimmick, the remaining money has been allowed to accrue in a Treasury fund to offset deficit spending elsewhere (E&E Daily, Oct. 28, 2011). Today, the so-called Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund is said to have accumulated surplus of $6.4 billion that exists only on paper.

But the measure introduced by Boustany -- called the "RAMP Act," for "Restore America's Maritime Promise" -- has run into quiet but firm opposition from Rules Committee and Appropriations Committee members who want to preserve their authority.

Ports and harbors, meanwhile, are silting in, slowing cargo traffic and the flow of goods across the nation's docks -- a condition worsened by last year's massive floods along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

Only 26 percent of ports are dredged to their authorized depths. This necessitates "light-loading," a practice in which ships are loaded to less than full capacity. This delays shipments and drives up costs that, in turn, get passed on to farmers, manufacturers and others trying to move their goods.

The maintenance backlog leaves East Coast ports especially unprepared to accept the wave of additional freighter traffic that could come their way once enlargements to the Panama Canal are completed in 2014, proponents of the bill say.

"It's about the jobs that will come to these surrounding communities because of the vibrant activity around these ports," said Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.). "This is something that should be -- that is a national embarrassment."

The powerful coalition backing the measure -- including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, coastal lawmakers, and representatives of ports and dredgers -- say the maintenance needs will make President Obama's promise to double exports by 2015 impossible to achieve.

But opponents on the Rules and Appropriations panels who see the bill as infringing on their authority have set up a major roadblock, a solution to which Transportation Committee staff and other stakeholders are trying to negotiate before tomorrow's markup of the transportation package. The package now contains only a placeholder for the RAMP Act.

Transportation Committee leaders are reluctant to include the RAMP Act in the transportation bill without buy-in from the Rules Committee, fearing that the provision might doom the entire package when it goes before the Rules Committee on its way to the House floor.

Rules Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) is the most significant holdout, according to several sources. Rules Vice Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) recently spoke to Boustany on the House floor, agreeing to co-sponsor the bill and pledging his support in getting it through Rules.

Dreier's office did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the RAMP Act this week.

The House speaker's office, Rules Committee members, appropriators, Budget Committee members and a host of other players are actively engaged in trying to find a solution, according to Alex Hergott, director of transportation and infrastructure congressional and public affairs for the U.S. Chamber. "We are putting pressure on the outcome and are less concerned about the mechanism."

At a hearing this morning on the RAMP Act before the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures that felt more like a pep rally for the bill, Boustany, who was chairing, plugged his measure as an obvious solution to a critical infrastructure problem.

"It's remarkable that we have members on both sides of the aisle, on this dais, and in this House that see a way forward on his particular issue," said Boustany. "With many of the problems we're faced with, we don't see ready solutions. But there is one here."

James McCurry Jr., director of administration for the Georgia Ports Authority, noted in testimony that about 80 percent of vessels calling at the Port of Savannah, the fourth-busiest in the nation by volume, are forced to light-load and wait for a high tide before coming into port.

It's "the equivalent of putting a parking lot in the middle of an interstate highway and wondering why traffic is slowed and time is wasted," McCurry testified this morning.

Reporter Jason Plautz contributed.