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What applicants need to know about TIGER’s replacement program: BUILD

The ever-popular TIGER grant program has returned for a ninth round, but this time with triple the usual amount of funding, a brand new name (and acronym), and new criteria and qualifications that were added to the program by appropriators in the Senate and House. Our resident expert takes a closer look at the changes.

On Friday April 20th, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) released the FY 2018 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development or BUILD program, previously known as the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER). Having worked on Capitol Hill when this program was passed in 2009 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and then at USDOT where I helped run multiple rounds of competitive grantmaking, I want to take a deeper dive, but also add some context about the changes to this program.

First, to say this program has always been popular is a gross understatement. It was not only the most popular program at USDOT but one of the most popular programs across all of government. USDOT routinely received 10 times the requests for funding than was available and overwhelmed grants.gov, the online portal for federal grant programs.

Flexibility has always been the key to its popularity. While most federal transportation dollars go to state DOTs (with a small amount going to transit agencies and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)) for specific types of projects written into federal law, TIGER funds could go to any governmental entity, including counties, cities, and rail authorities. This aspect continues in the BUILD program. Likewise, most transportation funds are divided up by “mode”—roadway vs. transit vs. rail vs. waterway. For example, if you have a roadway resurfacing project that includes the replacement of bus stops and the purchase of buses, for conventional federal transportation dollars, you would have to apply separately to different roadway and transit programs, which can involve multiple agencies within your state DOT and also within USDOT.

With BUILD, you can continue to get the necessary funding for your entire project in one application at one time.

As an aside, let me address the name change. I can’t pretend to be happy to see the name TIGER go away. As a proud graduate of Louisiana State University (LSU), I’ve been asked for years if the program was named after my LSU Tigers. The name preceded me but I have always loved the association. Still, as a product of the Recovery Act, TIGER’s focus was on projects that were both ready to go and could provide an economic shot in the arm. In the years since 2009, we have moved beyond the need for the intensive and immediate economic recovery that we sought in 2009, and it is time for a new name too. BUILD is a good one.

What makes BUILD different?

So what makes BUILD different from previous rounds of TIGER? Congress required the administration to keep the 2016 criteria (safety, economic competitiveness, quality of life, environmental sustainability, and state of repair), so the short answer is not a whole lot.

But the changes that were made are still notable.

First, there is a whole lot more money available: $1.5 billion. This is the most that Congress has appropriated to this program since the Recovery Act and triple the $500 million made available in the last round in FY2017. Additionally, up to $15 million of that $1.5 billion may be used for planning, preparation, or design grants for eligible projects (as happened in TIGER’s 2nd and 6th rounds.) USDOT Secretary Elaine Chao has the discretion on whether she wants to award any or all of that $15 million.

Congress also capped individual awards at $25 million. This one is quite a shame. In the first round of TIGER, we were able to fund a piece of the CREATE project in Chicago—a huge multi-billion effort to rationalize rail movement through the region and de-conflict it with transit and roadways—an enormous project with benefits that rippled throughout the country. We were able to fund double-stacking rail projects like the National Gateway Freight Rail Corridor and the replacement of the I-244 bridge in Tulsa. In subsequent rounds, projects tended to top out around $25 million because Congress shrank the overall size of the program but still required geographic equity, modal balance, and a fair rural/urban split. These factors combined to make it incredibly hard to fund any larger projects and still check all of those boxes. With the increase in funding for this round, USDOT had an opportunity to fund more of these larger, transformative projects; but Congress has unfortunately made that option unworkable.

Third, USDOT will now evaluate applicants on how well they secure and commit new, non-federal revenue for projects. This is a major new criterion worth elaborating on. USDOT defines new revenue as “revenue that is not included in current and projected funding levels and results from specific actions taken to increase transportation infrastructure investment.”

It is important to note that USDOT won’t consider any local or state revenue authorized before January 1st, 2015 as new revenue and nor can such revenue be applied as matching funds for BUILD projects. So, for example, if a state increased its gas tax before January 1, 2015, USDOT will not count the resulting revenue raised as new revenue. That includes the 12 states that took the bold step of increasing their state transportation funding between 2012 and 2014. Examples of new revenue according to USDOT are asset recycling, tolling, tax-increment financing, or sales or gas tax increases. Under this definition, bonds do not qualify as a new revenue source.

Fourth, Congress provided a strict timeline for making awards. USDOT must announce the recipients of BUILD grants no later than December 17, 2018. In order to meet that deadline, USDOT released this notice quickly and has set a deadline of 8:00 p.m. EDT on July 19, 2018 for all applications. Five months to make award decisions may seem like a long time to folks on the outside, but given that USDOT received 451 applications in the most recent round (for just one-third of the amount of funding available here), it will take a lot of hard work from the folks at USDOT to hit their deadlines.

Questions for USDOT

The emphasis on non-federal resources is not new from this administration. For the localities that haven’t raised new funding since January 2015, they’ll be hard-pressed to do so in the next few months before applications are due. And it will be difficult to balance the preference for new funding with USDOT’s other priorities. For example, the Trump administration wants to prioritize rural projects, but rural areas have the least ability to toll or raise new funding. Which of these competing priorities will win out? I tend to think the rural priority will.

If your state has raised the gas tax, do localities within that state get to take credit for it? What if a state prohibits its localities from raising funds? I assume that the administration will excuse state DOTs from this exercise, but will they hold these restrictions against states in their applications?

These are the sort of questions I plan to ask USDOT officials on our members-only webinar, scheduled for May 14 at 4 p.m. EDT. T4A members can email their questions in advance to Program Manager Alicia Orosco.

The last point I will make is that transit was basically locked out of the most recent round of TIGER awards. Many people have asked me whether it is worth the effort to apply for funding for transit projects this time. My answer is an unqualified “yes!” With three times the funding as last year and a cap on the size of awards, we can expect USDOT to fund 2-3 times as many projects. It will be harder for the administration to not select transit projects, especially projects that have some value capture or other funding associated with it. Further, many members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have complained mightily about the lack of transit projects in the last round. If they fail to fund transit reasonably this time, Congress will probably slap another requirement on them, and I think USDOT knows that and would like to avoid it.

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USDOT reopens the comments on the MPO Planning and Coordination Rule

In an interesting move, US DOT has reopened public comment on the MPO Planning and Coordination rule, which proposed requiring urbanized areas with multiple MPOs to coordinate their planning efforts together, among numerous other changes. The proposed rule received over 500 public comments before it closed on the original August 26 deadline. (See T4America’s public comment here.)

The extension allows for an additional month of public comments, setting the new comment deadline to October 24, 2016. 

USDOT appears to taking the unusual step of leaving the question entirely open of whether any provisions in the proposed rule will actually be finalized and turned into new regulations. FHWA and FTA are requesting specific public comment to inform their decision of “whether to finalize any provisions within the scope of the NPRM” including comments on:

  • potential exceptions that should be included in the final rule, and criteria for applying such exceptions;
  • the impact of the proposed requirements for unified planning products where multiple MPOs serve the same urbanized area; and
  • detailed comments on expected costs of the rule.

Comments submitted under the extension should address the points above and previously submitted comments should not be resubmitted. Federal Register Notice here. T4America’s summary of the NPRM is here and T4America’s public comment is available here.

Illinois legislature passes new policy that will aid the financing of transit projects

A just-passed bill in Illinois will make it easier to finance the construction and expansion of transit service across the state, making it easier for several crucial transit projects to go forward in the Chicago region.

This post was written by Peter Skosey, the Executive Vice President of the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago, Illinois, and reprinted here with his permission. MPC is a T4America member. Curious about membership with T4America? Find out more here.

Transit in Chicago just got a whole lot better, thanks to the General Assembly in Springfield — not the actor normally credited with such matters.

On July 1, 2016, the House and Senate approved the Transit Facility Improvement Area (TFIA), an innovative approach to finance specific transit projects in the City of Chicago. MPC has long supported this solution that many other cities across the country use, including Denver, San Francisco, Atlanta, New York and Milwaukee.

For decades, the entire country has neglected maintenance of existing trains, roads and bridges in favor of building new infrastructure. However, the latest federal transportation bill created a new “core capacity” provision, championed by Illinois’ own Sen. Dick Durbin, which allows critically needed maintenance projects [that will improve capacity], such as rebuilding the Chicago Transit Authority’s Red and Purple lines from Belmont north to the end of line in Evanston, to receive significant funding from Washington. These federal transit grants have one “catch:” locals must match those dollars, in this case about one-for-one.

chicago amtrak expansionBy authorizing TFIA, the Illinois General Assembly created a way for Chicago to provide the necessary match for Red/Purple Line modernization and critical improvements to Union Station  — for which Amtrak is currently doing phase 1 engineering and seeking a master developer.

Here’s how TFIA works: The added value that enhanced transit service brings to the surrounding property is captured in the form of property taxes and used to finance the improvements to the transit facility [that catalyzed the increases in the first place].

In the case of Union Station, Amtrak is seeking a developer to build on three parcels it controls. (Indicated in blue in the image above.) The additional property tax generated from those three new developments would be captured for up to 35 years to finance critical improvements to Union Station allowing for wider platforms, a roomier concourse and more trains in and out of the station. This is imperative, as Union Station is at capacity now and future growth of Chicago’s downtown depends on people being able to access their jobs via transit.

Many deserve kudos and thanks for supporting the TFIA measure: the original Senate and House sponsors of SB277, Heather Steans (D-Chicago) and Ron Sandack (R-Downers Grove); House leader Barbara Flynn Currie (D-Chicago) and Sen. Toi Hutchinson (D-Chicago Heights), who sponsored the ultimate bill, SB2562; members of the House who voted 78 to 27 in favor; and the Senate, which unanimously approved the measure.

Passage of TFIA was a great step forward in the battle to maintain our region’s transportation infrastructure and remain competitive in the global economy. Next up: Illinois must identify $43 billion in new revenues over the next 10 years to take care of the rest of the system.

These kinds of important changes to state policy are exactly what we’ll be discussing at Capital Ideas II this November 16-17 in Sacramento. Join us there and learn lessons to take back to your state. Register today!

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How to use performance measures: Performance measures for members, part IV

Beth Osborne

Beth Osborne

Performance measures should be used to prioritize and account for public spending and, through this, demonstrate to the public that their dollars are being used wisely. There are four ways to deploy performance measures: 1) create a dashboard, 2) prioritize projects, 3) optimize investments and 4) check on the performance of past investments. 

This is the fourth post in a series on performance measures by Beth Osborne, T4America Senior Policy Advisor. Catch up on the series with a high-level overview of the concept, find out how and why you should go beyond the federal requirements and learn more about choosing the best measures for addressing your priorities. -Ed.

A dashboard

A visualization of data or metrics known as a “dashboard” can be a useful snapshot of current conditions or the direction an area is moving. Dashboards are useful because they are visual and quickly lay out in one glance the region’s goals and the current status. Two examples are Salt Lake City and the Virginia Department of Transportation.

VDOT dashboard example

Sample dashboard from VDOT

The development of a dashboard can help determine what the public wants to prioritize — the public has an easy-to-digest summary of core statistics about your transportation network to help them choose what’s important. But this tool has a notable limitation: it’s not responsive to those public priorities if it isn’t also connected to decisions about public spending. After all, you could have an elegant dashboard that’s easy for anyone to understand rating the safety of the roadway…while making no investments in roadway safety.

A dashboard doesn’t automatically make it clear that any investment decisions are being made to impact the statistics being measured or displayed.

Prioritizing projects

The State of Virginia recently decided to take steps to ensure that the public’s priorities were better reflected in their process of selecting projects. Their legislature passed a bill in 2014 requiring all new capacity projects to be weighed against each other based on five priority areas: congestion reduction, economic competitiveness, access to opportunity, safety and environmental protection. They created a process — now available to the public —for ranking these outcomes based on significant public input.

Optimize investments

Spurred on in part by funding uncertainty, The State of Tennessee took a step back and analyzed their entire list of planned projects with a critical eye. They looked closely at the expected outcomes of their planned projects and then searched for other less expensive ways to accomplish the same things. The results were quite impressive, with multi-million dollar projects replaced by projects that cost just hundreds of thousands, saving millions and still bringing 80-90 percent of the benefits of the more expensive project. (A presentation on their new process can be found here.)

How have past investments performed?

In the world of transportation planning where everyone is always looking forward, forward, forward, it can be incredibly useful to take a look backwards on a regular basis and see if past choices have met projections and brought the benefits promised — and recalibrate the process if they have not.

Transportation agencies do their best to project the outcomes of each investment, but no one can get it right all the time. The agencies that are making the most of their dollars are the ones that check back on their investments to see if they performed as expected and, if they did not, make changes.

To do this, the goals of each project must be clearly stated and then reviewed at major milestones to see if the expected results materialized. The public notices when we make promises that don’t come true, and being right there with them and explaining what will change with the process is an important way to build credibility. We must check our own work and continually improve our performance, especially if we want the public to continue to invest in our programs.

House Moves to Start Consideration of FY16 Transportation-HUD Bill

Tonight, at 7 p.m. the House is expected to start consideration of the FY16 Transportation-HUD appropriations bill (HR 2577). We expect a marathon markup that will extend into the early morning hours as this bill has an “open” amendment process that doesn’t restrict the number of amendments eligible for consideration. The House Republicans expect to finalize markup and pass this bill before the end of the day tomorrow.

This bill makes several severe cuts to critical transportation and infrastructure programs and investments. Specifically, this bill would:

  • Cut $200 million for FTA’s New and Small Starts capital investment grant programs.
  • Slashes the TIGER program by 80 percent to just $100 million.
  • Cut Amtrak’s budget by $250 million.

Please contact your House Representative this evening or early tomorrow and let them know what local projects are at stake of being put back on the shelf if Congress can’t adequately fund these important transportation programs this year.

As you will recall this bill provides $55.3 billion in discretionary budget authority for FY16, which is $1.5 billion (2.8%) above FY15 levels but $9.7 billion below the President’s request. Nearly all of the increase in funds for FY16 is used to offset drops in Federal Housing Administration receipts, leading to proposed cuts elsewhere.

The House Republicans have developed the FY16 Transportation-HUD spending bill based on their budget resolution’s adherence to sequester level discretionary spending caps for FY 2016, established in the Budget Control Act of 2011. The two-year Ryan-Murray Bipartisan Budget Agreement that replaced much of the sequester’s cuts to defense and non-defense funding expired at the end of FY15, which limits funding for the regular appropriations process to $1,016.6 billion for FY 2016, a funding increase of just 0.29%.

It is our hope that Congress can agree to a new budget that eases the sequestration levels and provides a greater transportation funding by the end of the fiscal year, but there are no guarantees.

If you want to send an email to your representative, you can do that here through our form here.

If you want to have even more impact, pick up the phone (you can find the number on the form page above), and urge your member not to support a bill that cuts TIGER, New Starts, and passenger rail at a time when they’re needed more than ever. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate in calling Joe McAndrew, T4A’s Policy Director at joe.mcandrew@t4america.org or 202-725-6627.

FY16 House Transportation-HUD Appropriations Analysis

  USDOT FY15 Enacted Appropriations House FY16 THUD Proposal Administration FY16 THUD Proposal Difference Between USDOT FY15 Enacted and Proposed House FY16 THUD Proposal Difference Between USDOT FY15 Enacted and Proposed Administration FY16 THUD Proposal
Federal-Aid Highways $40.26B $40.26B $51.3B – -$11.04B
Transit Formula Grants $8.6B $8.6B $13.9B – -$5.3B
Transit ‘New Starts’ & ‘Small Starts’ $2.12B $1.92B $3.25B -$200M -$1.13B
TIGER $500M $100M $1.25B -$400M -$1.15B
Amtrak Operating $250M $289M $2.5B* +$39M -$1.1B
Amtrak Capital $1.14B $850M -$290M

 * Administration’s FY16 budget request included Amtrak operating and capital accounts in a proposed “Current Passenger Rail Service” program.

Why Transit Advocacy? T4A Member, Andrew Austin, Has The Answer

For many people, advocacy is in their blood. For a select few, organizing around transit accessibility is their life’s calling. Andrew Austin, policy director for Transportation Choices Coalition (a T4A member) was recently profiled by his university on what exactly it is about transit that has led him to make a career out of advocacy. This is a beautifully written piece and well worth the read. Congratulations Andrew!

“During my junior year, I witnessed people in Tacoma relying on buses to get to work, school, the doctor or just visit their families,” says Austin. “It really hit home that public transit access touches and impacts so many other critical issues.”

“Even now, nearly 10 years later and equipped with a few more tools, I feel like I’m the same young guy, figuring out how I can be an effective advocate and doing this work to the best of my ability.”

Read the full piece: http://www.plu.edu/resolute/spring-2015/transportation-advocacy/

And watch a video from the piece:

Transit in Tacoma with Andrew Austin from Pacific Lutheran University on Vimeo.

“It’s not just a highway bill. It has to be a transportation bill.”

Those were the words of Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (OR, 1) during a transportation roundtable on May 5th that T4America participated in with local members and other partners while House members were back home in their districts

At the roundtable with key local leaders and advocates in Hillsboro, Rep. Bonamici explained her concerns with transportation funding and the need to convince her colleagues to support new revenues to make the Highway Trust Fund whole.

Transportation for America member Washington County was represented by Commissioner Dick Schouten and Land Use and Transportation Director Andrew Singelakis in the meeting at the Willow Creek Campus of Portland Community College on TriMet’s MAX light rail line in Hillsboro. Smart Growth America Local Leaders Council member Mayor Denny Doyle attended, along with transportation leaders from labor, business, and Oregon DOT.

I shared the tally of how many states have passed transportation revenue packages – 7 states this year, and 19 since 2012 — from T4A’s state transportation funding tracker, demonstrating the growing needs for more reliable transportation funding. I also shared our data on the re-election rate for state legislators who support gas tax increases – 98% in their primaries, 90% in general elections, an indication that supporting increased transportation revenue is a good political choice for lawmakers.

Commissioner Schouten spoke about his experiences in Asia and Western Europe, remarking how we are falling behind our international competitors. He called for bold vision and leadership.

Andrew Singelakis talked about Washington County’s role in funding its own projects using the Major Streets Transportation Improvement Program (MSTIP), general fund, transportation development taxes and other programs. Washington County does its part to raise funding locally but is counting on a reliable federal partner to help them complete larger projects they cannot do on their own.

For her part, Representative Bonamici appears to support a lot of T4America’s platform — investment, transportation options, key programs like New Starts, TIGER, and TIFIA, and the importance of the federal government taking a strong role in funding transportation.

Last week’s event was a good step forward in the long march to build a case for federal support for a robust transportation system.

Chris Rall is T4America’s Pacific Northwest Field Organizer