(Federal) sharing is caring

March 26, 2018
By LAUREN GARDNER, With help from Brianna Gurciullo and Tanya Snyder, Politico Morning Transportation; March 26, 2018

SHARING IS CARING: MT readers have now had the weekend to parse the fiscal 2018 omnibus. But did you catch this line tucked under the section for TIGER grants? — “… the secretary shall not use the federal share as a selection criteria in awarding projects.” Readers may recall that DOT faced criticism last year for saying that an INFRA application suggesting a smaller federal share would be “more competitive” than an application suggesting a larger federal share. On a conference call Friday with reporters, DOT Deputy Secretary Jeffrey Rosen said selection criteria “with regard to federal share has been one that, for better or worse, has been a bit of a flashpoint in all directions.” But he added that DOT “put less emphasis” on the federal versus non-federal share when it came to TIGER applications than it did for INFRA applications. “It’s not a big factor in that TIGER is geared to a different tier of project sizes, and the key thing in that program is multimodal, and there are caps on the states,” Rosen said. Still, Rosen argued that the omnibus language “doesn’t fundamentally affect our ability to try to revise the solicitation criteria in positive ways.” The department, for instance, wants to stress “project delivery acceleration,” he said.

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