Friday, February 19, 2010

Transit Funds -- the installment plan

Right after the Presidents Day holiday, the Federal Transit Administration issued its notice allocating $5.4 billion in transit funds to states, cities and specific capital projects. Lots of numbers in this 100-page notice, but no surprises.

The main thing to note is that FTA was only able to allocate 5/12 of its FY 2010 appropriation. That's because SAFETEA-LU, the legislation authorizing these funds, was not extended through the full fiscal year. The current extension runs only to the end of this month.

Another SAFETEA-LU extension is likely to be included in any "jobs bills" that the Senate considers (the House version of a jobs bill extends SAFETEA-LU authorizations through the end of the current fiscal year), but that action awaits debate on the Senate floor next week. Assuming a remainder-of-year extension is enacted, FTA will probably then issue another apportionments notice, and is likely then to issue notices inviting applications for a few of its smaller competitive grant programs, such as transit in parks and tribal transit.

If you want to see precisely how much money is allocated to each recipient of formula-based transit grants, and how much is allocated to all the earmarked capital bus, bus facility, and "new starts" fixed-guideway systems, read the full notice on the FTA web site (NOTE: if reading the Federal Register notice, read the PDF file, not the "text" file, as the latter does not contain any of the funding tables).

No comments:

Post a Comment