Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) President Dennis Slater today issued the following statement in response to President Obama’s comments on the highway bill:

Infrastructure investment is a critical job creator. Roads, highways and bridges aren’t funded or built a few months at a time. These critical projects require long-term planning. Extending a clean highway bill, as President Obama called on Congress to do, provides America’s equipment manufacturers with the certainty they need to hire, contractors with the certainty they need to make capital investments in new equipment and employees, and the U.S economy with a badly needed growth engine. Failure to extend the highway bill would further endanger the already tenuous economic recovery America’s manufacturers are working so hard to strengthen. Rebuilding and modernizing our public infrastructure is a safety, economic and competitiveness issue that Congress has a serious responsibility to address.