AASHTO News, 23 December 2015
Now that Congress in its 2016 spending bill has said states may repurpose decade-old, obsolete earmark funds and spend them on new projects, the Federal Highway Administration is in the process of finalizing information to identify how much money will go to which states.
Joung Lee, policy director for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, said the FHWA is currently determining the specific dollar amounts that may become available for affected state departments of transportation based on the congressional provision.
“The FHWA needs to catalogue each of the earmarks that are covered by the provision in the omnibus spending bill, which targets projects over 10 years old that have spent out less than 10 percent of the original authorization, to show what that means in new resources to meet their current project needs,” Lee told the AASHTO Journal.
“For now we only know that it may cover quite a number of earmarks that might otherwise indefinitely remain unspent,” he said, “and that it may support a significant amount of new infrastructure investment based on money Congress already authorized but that state DOTs could not actually spend.”
State DOTs have in some cases found it difficult to fully use money from congressional earmarks, since they have little flexibility to apply the narrowly targeted, project-specific funds based on the precise language lawmakers used to insert them into legislation. Any error in how earmarks were drafted could make them unusable, or they could have been intended for projects that did not go forward.
Some earmark money has reportedly sat unused, for instance, because an author in Congress wrote it for a project that was under way with other funding by the time the legislation passed. In addition, earmarks may have arisen outside of the long-range transportation plans and programs states rely on to identify their priority projects, and in some cases local support for earmarked projects could have changed and taken them off the approved list.
The past decade, in which the severe 2008-09 recession and slow recovery left many states cutting back on spending, has set the stage for redoubling of efforts for revenue measures to invest in their transportation systems. Meanwhile, if states did not have enough revenue allocated for the local matching funds requirement, a federal project earmark could have simply remained unspent but unusable for other needs.
Congress, on pg. 1508 of the giant 2016 spending bill, specified that “notwithstanding the original period of availability” of the earmarks, the DOTs of states that were to be the original recipients shall now be able to use the funds for projects within 50 miles of the original earmark for three years after notifying the USDOT secretary how they would spend the money.
Lee said in coming weeks the FHWA intends to update its earmarks database to both list all earmarks it administers and to pin down all those that as of Sept. 30, 2015, would be subject to the new congressional provision.
Lee expects that the agency early in 2016 will provide an official notice of the repackaged amounts available from each affected earmark project that the affected states can use for their other needs, and issue guidance to FHWA Division Offices across the country.