Clark County (The Evening News)
‘Jobs bill’ may impact local projects
More stimulus may need to be fast-tracked locally for transportation work
In President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Wednesday night, the economy, and how to revive it, took center stage.
Obama announced that he wants to initiate another round of stimulus, this time in the form of a “jobs bill, as an answer to the economic crisis in the country.
The bill — H.R. 2847 — has cleared the House of Representatives, but it still must pass the Senate before it is enacted, and would provide additional funding to states and major metropolitan areas for federal-aided highway projects, according to a letter addressed to the Kentuckiana Regional Planning and Development Agency, from Federal Highway Administration officials from Indiana and Kentucky. If the bill passes, it will have a major impact locally, especially on transportation projects.
“Basically, the jobs bill looks a lot like the [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] bill,” said David Burton, transportation planner with KIPDA, at a Thursday afternoon meeting of the organization.
Stimulus money has been a major funding mechanism for numerous KIPDA projects in Southern Indiana and metropolitan Louisville.
However, deadlines for allocating and spending the stimulus money pressed KIPDA and the individual project sponsors to move under a tight timeline in order to receive funding. Now, only one Indiana road project remains that will be funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The project is the repaving of Scottsville Road in Floyd County.
“Our last letting statewide will be Feb. 24,” said Kathy Eaton, program budget manager with the Indiana Department of Transportation’s Seymour District. “That will be the last letting for ARRA for us. So, we’re pretty much wrapped up.”
While INDOT and local project sponsors are putting the final touches on any projects under way, the possible second round of stimulus that could come to KIPDA has one major distinction.
The difference is the funding will have to be allocated even faster than the first round of stimulus money.
“For 50 percent of the funds that the KIPDA MPO [Metropolitan Planning Organization] would receive, they have to be contracted in 90 days, following the signature of President Obama,” Burton said. “The concept of shovel-ready that we used with the ARRA process isn’t good enough.”
Shovel-ready was a term used for many improvement projects relating to all initial planning steps being completed and the project being ready for construction.
For any Indiana project, speed will be paramount and more qualifications will cause expediency to be harder to achieve.
“Technically, we’re only going to have seven months from the time the bill is enacted to get these projects to construction, so we will meet that year deadline,” Eaton said.
The process will move along so quickly that projects that would wish to receive job bill funding would need to be submitted starting next week.
“They want to have the projects identified that could possibly be used by the jobs bill by Feb. 3,” Burton said.
However, there are still several major hurdles that exist, including the jobs bill has yet to be passed into law.
If that happens, KIPDA could expect a similar amount it received for the first round of ARRA funding, which was about $3.9 million for Indiana, according to Josh Suiter, community outreach specialist for KIPDA.
Another major problem looming is that the area Metropolitan Transportation Plan is in a lapse period while funding is being determined for the Ohio River Bridges Project. The transportation plan will remain in a lapse until that funding plan is figured out.
“No new projects may be amended into your Transportation Improvement Plan to utilize these funds,” the letter from federal highway officials said. “However, to advance projects to meet the requirements of this proposed legislation, projects already included in your TIP may be administratively modified with changes that are considered relatively minor.”
One project that may be a beneficiary of the jobs bill is the reconstruction of Hamburg Pike. Jeffersonville Mayor Tom Galligan said the improvements planned to the road would span from Dutch Lane to Veterans Parkway, including widening the road, adding turn lanes, repairing sidewalks and repaving the road.
While a project in Jeffersonville may benefit from more stimulus dollars, the timeline presented in which all plans need to be in place caught the ire of Galligan.
“The way they’re doing this is absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “I get tired of running around, trying to chase my tail, to make a two-week deadline and do four years worth of work in it. This is an exercise in futility.
“My frustration level gets a little bit up on this and I’m trying to stay calm, but stupidity kills me. And this to me is stupid.”
Another timeline that is highly optimistic, but has caught the praise of the mayor, is for the bi-state authority to find a funding mechanism for the Ohio River Bridges project.
“They think they can sell bonds by the end of this year,” Galligan said. “They want you on the bridge by 2012, so they’re really optimistic.”
But Galligan also believes the members of the bi-state authority may be hit with a dose of reality.
“They’re business people; they are used to doing this, and this, and that [to get a] result,” he said. “I said, ‘well this is government, so we do it a different way. We drag a chain with us everywhere we go.’”
SO YOU KNOW
• KIPDA will soon have a federal certification review public meeting. The review, which occurs once every four years, is designed to evaluate the transportation-planning process. As part of the review, a public meeting will be held in order to allow people to talk directly with the Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration officials about the Louisville area transportation planning process, according to KIPDA.
The meeting will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. March 9 at the South Louisville Community Center, 2911 Taylor Blvd. For more information on the meeting, visit www.kipda.org or call 502-266-6084.
— Staff Writer Braden Lammers
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