Foxx On TIGER: Demand Overwhelms Supply

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DALLAS - Sponsors of 625 projects are applying for grants totaling $9.8 billion from the Transportation Department's Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program, even though DOT has only $500 million to disperse in fiscal 2015.

DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx announced the number of applicants on July 30, saying they indicate the need for infrastructure investment increases.

The TIGER program will be able to satisfy only 6% of the funding requests in 2015, Foxx said.

"The consistent number of high quality projects we're unable to fund through TIGER every year demonstrates the need for Congress to act to give more communities access to this vital lifeline," Foxx said.

Most of the grant requests are for highway projects, which account for 60% of the 625 eligible construction applications. Transit projects account for 18% of the applications, with rail at 8%, and port and bicycle-pedestrian projects totaling 6% each.

Applications for the seventh round of TIGER grants were due in early July. The competitive grant program began in 2009 as part of the stimulus effort and has been reauthorized annually ever since.

The program has provided a total of $4.1 billion in grants to 342 projects in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico since it began six years ago, Foxx said.

But successful applicants are a tiny fraction of the more than 6,000 requests over the same period seeking a total of $124 billion in TIGER grants, he said.

"That means that for every project selected, 17 projects that communities across the country need go unfunded," Foxx said. "And for every dollar requested, we have only been able to provide about three cents.

The 625 projects deemed to be eligible for the 2015 funding round were selected from almost a thousand pre-applications, he said.

"That is why we proposed doubling TIGER in the Grow America Act," Foxx said.

President Obama would increase TIGER grants to $1.25 billion per year in his six-year, $478 billion Grow America Act transportation bill.

Sen. Patty Murray, who sponsored the original TIGER legislation in 2009, tried to put an amendment authorizing a $500 million per year TIGER program into the six-year DRIVE Act passed July 30 by the Senate.

Murray and three other lawmakers have introduced a bill to make the TIGER grant program permanent. Co-sponsors of S. 1748 include Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

The House passed a FY2016 transportation appropriations measure in May that reduced the TIGER program to $100 million.

The House bill, H.R. 2577, drew a threat of a presidential veto from the Office of Management and Budget, which said the administration "strongly opposes" the legislation.

"If the President were presented with H.R. 2577, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill," OMB said June 2 in a Statement of Administration Policy.

TIGER grants awarded in the $600 million sixth round in 2014 included $20 million for upgrades to a highway in the Florida Everglades, $25 million for a bus system in Richmond, Va., and $20 million for a project to renovate a container terminal at Port of Seattle in Washington.

 

 

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