T4America Blog

News, press releases and other updates

Posts Tagged "competitive grants"

A new program to help communities thrive

For the Biden administration to achieve its goals, all communities will need to be able to take advantage of federal funds. But communities with limited resources face a steeper hurdle to accessing these dollars. The Thriving Communities Program is a small step in the right direction to ensure every community is set up for success.

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SMART grants could make transportation smarter, or not

The Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) competitive grant program offers communities funds to apply new technologies to solve their transportation challenges. How smart this program ends up being depends on whether it treats the application of new technology as a tactic, or as a goal in and of itself.

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Positioning for competitive grant application success

A conference room filled with diverse people taking notes

With scores of competitive, surface transportation grant programs to administer, USDOT faces a heavy lift to get these programs off the ground, on top of administering the legacy programs that already existed. How should prospective grant applicants start preparing for success?

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USDOT controls $200+ billion in competitive grants for states and metros

Bag of money

While the bulk of the $643 billion for surface transportation in the infrastructure bill goes out to state DOTs, more than $200 billion stays with USDOT to be awarded via competitive grants to states, metro areas, and tribal governments—through dozens of newly created, updated, and existing competitive grant programs.

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BUILDing a better competitive grant program, in 5 steps

Under President Trump, USDOT has hijacked the TIGER/BUILD competitive grant program, taking it far from its intended function. After a decade of experience with the program there are a number of simple steps that lawmakers could take to get it back on track and even improve it.

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Taming the TIGER: Trump turns innovative grant program into another roads program

Under President Trump, the U.S. Department of Transportation has effectively turned the formerly innovative BUILD program—created to advance complex, hard-to-fund projects—into little more than a rural roads program, dramatically undercutting both its intent and utility.

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Elected officials and local organizations: Support TIGER & public transit funding

Facing the prospect of severe cuts from the Trump administration and Congress, T4America is looking for elected officials and organizations to show their support for investing in smart projects to move goods, move people and support the local economies that our nation’s prosperity is built on.

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Though the program’s future is uncertain, $500 million in TIGER grants are now available

Though the future of the program could be in doubt, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced yesterday that $500 million is now available for the best local projects in the next round of the TIGER competitive grant program.

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Join us for a discussion on the TIGER grant program and what you need to know before applying

T4America is hosting a webinar this Thursday at 3 p.m. to help municipalities and states interested in applying for this year’s $500 million in grants available in the latest round of TIGER grant funding.

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Could a national TIGER program co-exist along with a version in each state? Yes, says U.S. DOT

As momentum builds for a proposal to give local communities of all sizes direct access to a share of federal transportation dollars via statewide competitive grant programs, a USDOT official affirmed that it would complement the existing national grant program and help meet more of the pressing needs in these communities.

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Competitive grant programs in PA and OR provide a blueprint for a different approach

There’s strong support for a plan in Congress to give locals more access to their transportation dollars, but two states are already leading the way on the idea of competitive grants for smart projects — and Pennsylvania took a big step today.

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The details on a new bill giving locals greater access to their federal dollars

Last week we reported on the introduction of an important bill to expand local access to federal transportation dollars, the Innovation in Surface Transportation Act (H.R. 4726). Today we want to provide a little more detail about how the proposed new grant program would work.

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New bill would give local communities greater access to federal transportation funds

A new bill introduced yesterday would give Local communities across the country greater access to federal transportation funds to invest in their homegrown transportation plans and projects — answering one of the most consistent requests we hear from our coalition of local leaders and officials across the country.

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T4America thanks Senators Cory Booker and Roger Wicker for their proposal to give local communities greater access to transportation funds

“On behalf of Transportation for America, its members and affiliates and local elected and business leaders, I want to thank Sen. Wicker and Sen. Booker for their leadership today in fighting for the transportation priorities of cities and towns across the country,” said James Corless, director of Transportation for America.

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