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Senate introduces infrastructure package with vote possible this week

The U.S. Senate will begin debating a bipartisan infrastructure package this week after lawmakers finished months of negotiations Sunday night.  

The bill, The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, will cost nearly $1.2 trillion over eight years and includes $550 billion in new spending for roads and bridges, inland waterways, rural broadband and other needs.

Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar tells Brownfield she feels good about the bill.

“It’s been long-fought (and) my piece of it is significant. It’s the broadband portion, over $65 billion to make sure that we can finally get the high-speed internet that we need for kids in classes (and) farmers in the field.”

Klobuchar says she’s “100 percent sure” the infrastructure bill will pass, possibly this week.

Senator Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, and Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona, led the effort with a larger group of negotiators who came up with the 3,000-page bill that’s narrower than the multi-trillion dollar plan the Biden administration introduced earlier this year.