Staff photo / David Skolnick U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown visited students at a summer manufacturing camp Monday at Oh Wow! The Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science and Technology in downtown Youngstown. Also listening to a presentation with him were Leeana Perez of Campbell, left, and Meredith Wakefield of Boardman.

YOUNGSTOWN — U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown said a nearly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure proposal is a good start, but a much bigger bill is needed — and he said the votes are there in the Senate to get both approved.

“This is a step,” Brown, D-Cleveland, said Monday of the bipartisan proposal. “It’s a modest step. I support putting people back to work in water and sewers and highways and all that. But there are a lot more needs.”

Brown said the bipartisan bill — with U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Terrace Park, as the lead Republican negotiator — is beneficial.

But “it’s not nearly sufficient,” he said during a visit to a summer manufacturing camp at Oh Wow! The Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science and Technology in downtown Youngstown.

“It doesn’t provide enough jobs for workers. It doesn’t provide enough physical infrastructure,” Brown said. “It doesn’t do enough for child care and broadband and housing that we need. It’s a two-step infrastructure” process.

The second step is a major infrastructure bill, which doesn’t have Republican support in Congress, that is estimated to cost between $3 trillion to $6 trillion.

The smaller, bipartisan bill needs 60 votes in the 50-50 Senate to overcome a potential Republican filibuster and it appears to have enough support.

The bigger, Democratic bill would need only 50 Senate votes — with Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, breaking the tie — to be approved under special reconciliation rules.

“The country wants us to go big and really build back better,” Brown said.

There have been issues with how much a couple of Democratic senators — Joe Machin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — are willing to spend and without them, the needed votes for the bigger proposal aren’t there.

But Brown said Monday he was confident the bill will get 50 votes.

He added: “This pandemic in many ways was the great revealer. It showed wealth inequality. It showed wages flat. It showed structural racism. It showed a lot of things that people recognize better than they did two years ago.”

Brown visited Oh Wow! on Monday to highlight a summer manufacturing camp there for girls in the fifth to eighth grades.

The camp is designed to spark an interest in electronics and engineering for girls, said Ralf Urbach, director of education and outreach at Oh Wow!

“We want to get them interested in manufacturing,” he said.

The camp has businesses, educators and others partner to help young Ohioans learn about manufacturing.

Brown later visited America Makes — National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, also in downtown Youngstown, a public-private partnership that uses 3D printing in manufacturing.

America Makes serves as a model for new tech hubs that will be established across the country, Brown said.