FHWA: NOT BEING ALL IT COULD BE

Commentary by Bill Wilkinson

RECISIONS -- SHOW ME WHERE THE MONEY WENT!
Last October, Tom Murtha of the Chicago MPO posted a question on one of the listservs about how the various State DOTs have dealt with Congressionally-mandated recisions for federal transportation funds. Periodically, the Congress will direct that the amount of funds authorized be reduced by some percentage. The FHWA allows each State DOT to decide on its own what programs to take the required dollars from to meet their required recision total. What this means is that if they so choose, a State DOT can take ALL of it from CMAQ or Transportation Enhancements or Safe Routes to School or whatever, and not touch other programs.

And, would you believe that this is exactly what some State DOTs opted to do? Shocking.

Now, back to Tom's question: how have the various DOTs been distributing their recisions; that is, how many dollars did they take from each of their various federal programs? Well, this seemed like a pretty straightforward bit of data and certainly something of significance, so I spent some time looking for this info on the FHWA's web site. Nada. So, I sent John Fegan, USDOT/FHWA bike/ped program manager, a request for help. John replied, "Let me look into it and I'll let you know what I find."

He did: "I did look into this further. What I found out was that FHWA does not publish a list of how each State chose to reduce funding to deal with the recision requirement." Say what?

Here, in part, is what I wrote back to John: "I wanted to let you know that I am very bothered about this. Such information is of great importance to many folks and should be a matter of readily available public record. For the FHWA to even suggest it is not tracking such info is a breach of fiscal responsibility, and this is likely not the case. So, it can only mean that FHWA does not want to share this information with the public.

"This position isn't going to stand. If you wish, feel free to let whomever know that I'm going to bring this to the attention of Congressman Oberstar and his committee staff. I'll wait a couple of weeks, so do let me know if there is any change of heart at FHWA on this matter. It would be nice to simply have the FHWA do the right thing -- that is, make all such data readily available on its web site -- and avoid all this other bother."

Update: no further response from John or FHWA. Later this week I plan to write to Congressman Oberstar, present the issue and problem, and ask for the Committee's assistance to get the FHWA to do what they should have already done. If this is the kind of data that you or your agency would like to have access to, you might want to let the Committee know that, too.

Meanwhile, let's all plan to keep a closer eye on the FHWA, AASHTO, and the State DOTs. They don't necessarily share our priorities and agenda. -- BW