TIGER and FASTLANE funding awarded by DOT comes up short

Last week, the United States Department of Transportation announced that almost $500 million will be made available for national transportation projects as part of its TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) competitive grant program.

This marks the eighth round of TIGER funding and it matches similar-sized investments announced in February 2016 and October 2015. The objective of the TIGER program is to ensure that economic funding is rapidly made available for transportation infrastructure projects and that project spending is monitored and transparent.

“For the eighth year running, TIGER will inject critical infrastructure dollars into communities across the country,” said Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “This unique program rewards innovative thinking and collaborative solutions to difficult and sometimes dangerous transportation problems.  A great TIGER program doesn’t just improve transportation; it expands economic opportunity and transforms a community.”

These grants are used to fund capital investments in surface transportation infrastructure and are awarded on a competitive basis for projects having a significant impact on the nation, a metropolitan area, or a region. And DOT added that the TIGER program supports innovative projects, including multi-modal and multi-jurisdictional projects, which are difficult to fund through traditional federal programs.  This year’s awards focus on capital projects that generate economic development and improve access to reliable, safe and affordable transportation for communities, both urban and rural.

Since 2009, the TIGER grant program has provided a combined $5.1 billion to 421 projects in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and tribal communities.  These federal funds leverage money from private sector partners, states, local governments, metropolitan planning organizations and transit agencies.  DOT noted that the 2016 TIGER round alone is leveraging nearly $500 million in federal investment to support $1.74 billion in overall transportation investments.

Demand for the 2016 TIGER grant program once again topped available funds, with DOT receiving 585 eligible applications from all 50 States, and several U.S. territories, tribal communities, cities, and towns throughout the United States, that cumulatively requested more than $9.3 billion in funding. And for its previous seven rounds, DOT received more than 7,300 applications requesting more than $143 billion for transportation projects across the country.

TIGER grants with a freight or supply chain focus this time around were in somewhat short supply, with less than $140 million, or 26 percent, in grant funding allocated to transportation projects with a freight emphasis. In past rounds, investments in freight and goods movement have accounted for as much as 53 percent of total TIGER funding. But this time around DOT awarded funding to 11 of these types of projects out of the 40 projects receiving funding, which is the lowest percentage since TIGER’s inception in 2009.

Leslie Blakey, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition for America’s Trade Gateways and Corridors (CAGTC) said that the lack of grant funding allocated for TIGER, as well as the Nationally Significant Freight and Highway Project, which is known as the FASTLANE program that was designed by Congress to make investments into the nation’s most critical freight and highway needs and was included in the $305 billion FAST Act passed by Congress late last year and awarded grants in early July, was disappointing.

“We were disappointed in both TIGER and FASTLANE,” Blakey told LM. “These grant programs are intended to prioritize projects based on objective criteria that identifies the public benefits of the investment. By any economic criteria, freight projects perform extremely well and should be receiving a much larger share of our federal investment. This has been our Coalition’s message for years and we think the FAST Act shows that Congress is listening. Unfortunately, USDOT seems to be tuned in to something else in making these grant awards.”

In early July, DOT released its proposed list of 18 projects as per FASTLANE. CAGTC said that the program received funding requests for a cumulative $9.8 billion, while only $759 million was made available in Fiscal Year 2016, translating into the program’s demand being ten times more than its actual size.  When Congress passed the FAST Act, it stated the FASTLANE program will award a total of $.4.5 billion over a five-year period.

Among the notable freight and goods movement hubs going unrecognized by DOT for TIGER and FASTLANE funding were:
-Southern California’s San Pedro Bay area, which handles 40 percent of our nation’s container traffic;
-Chicago’s CREATE program, which is recognized as a project of national significance for its impact on commerce as the principal U.S. freight intersection;
-Memphis, a global freight hub employing a higher percentage of logistics workers than any other region in the country; and
-New Jersey, which as the highest density of railroads in the nation and high volumes of international trade; and
-Florida’s seaports provide a critical trade link to growing economies in the Southern Hemisphere