DALLAS -- The Transportation Department is seeking applications for the first $800 million from $4.5 billion of federal funds dedicated to a new discretionary grant program for critical highway and freight projects designed to provide relief from congestion.
The applications are due by April 14.
The $305 billion Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, which was enacted in early December, created the National Significant Freight and Highway Projects Program and funded it at an average of $900 million per year. Funding begins at $800 million in fiscal 2016 and goes up by $50 million per year to $1 billion in the fiscal 2020, the fifth and final year of the FAST Act.
The new grants have been titled Fostering Advancements in Shipping and Transportation for the Long-term Achievement of National Efficiencies, or FASTLANE, by the Transportation Department.
Applicants can include states or groups of states, local governments, metropolitan planning organizations, and tribal governments.
The FASTLANE program is the first federal transportation grant specifically aimed at de-bottlenecking freight infrastructure since the Transportation Department was created in 1966, said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.
"We now have an opportunity to fund high-impact projects that address key challenges affecting the movement of people and freight," he said.
"We're prepared to fund promising freight projects that meet the statutory requirements as quickly as possible," Foxx said. "We're looking for transformative nationally or regionally significant highway, rail, port, and intermodal freight projects with project size in excess of $100 million."
The FAST Act limits funding to $500 million over the five years for freight rail and port projects that improve freight movements on highways. Freight rail does not contribute to the Highway Trust Fund, which provides the FASTLANE grants, while ports have their own dedicated harbor trust fund.
The FASTLANE program focus on highway infrastructure is a case of using tomorrow's dollars to pay for yesterday's ideas, said Stephen Davis, a spokesman for the transportation advocacy group Transportation For America. "Freight moves across the country on every mode of travel imaginable and our freight issues are inherently multimodal, but Congress didn't see it that way when they earmarked 90% of the funds for highway projects," he said. "Unfortunately other options like ports, railroads, intelligent transportation systems, or better demand management are only eligible for a small share of the freight dollars."
The Transportation Department issued a draft National Freight Strategic Plan in October that said freight movements will increase by 45% over the next 30 years with a 70% growth in population.
The FAST Act (PL 114-94) stipulates that 25% of the grant funding goes to rural projects, regardless of size, and reserves 10% of the funding to projects expected to cost less than $100 million.
Large projects, defined as those with a price tag of at least $100 million or 30% of a state's federal highway funding in the previous fiscal year, are eligible for grants of $25 million or more in fiscal 2016. A smaller project can receive a minimum of $5 million. The Transportation Department is also taking applications for the $500 million of competitive grants available in fiscal 2016 from the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program. Proposals must be submitted by April 29.
A total of $4.6 billion of TIGER grants have been awarded to 381 projects since the program began as part of the 2009 stimulus effort. Applications for the first seven rounds have totaled more than $134 billion for 6,700 proposed projects.
