Mostly cloudy with hints of sun

摘要

There's nothing but a gray fog in the crystal ball where the transportation construction industry should be in 2003, and the fog turns on uncertainty about federal spending and the economy in general. Congress left town at the end of 2002 without passing many appropriations bills, including the one that authorizes spending for highway construction. But the biggest cloud over the highway construction business is the reautho-rization of the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st century (TEA-21) and the Aviation Investment Reform Act for the 21st Century (AIR-21). On Oct. 1, the industry will start a new regime, but no one knows what that regime will look like. Meanwhile there has been no official word from the National Bureau of Economic Research pinpointing the end of the recession that officially started in March 2001, but that announcement often comes late because the group has to wait to gather enough data.