Officials soften tone on funding
Transportation project deadline for information not meant as cutoff date
State transportation officials are softening their tone after sending a letter last week that suggested Maryland counties could lose funding for major transportation projects if they don’t produce a host of additional information within two weeks.
The request was prompted by a new law that requires the Maryland Department of Transportation to create a scoring system for future highway and transit projects budgeted at $5 million or more.
The department is beginning to score projects for its next six-year capital plan and hopes to gather more data from local jurisdictions to help with the ranking process, said spokeswoman Erin Henson.
But transportation projects will not automatically be dismissed if counties do not send in the additional information that MDOT asked for, she said.
That position differed from the directives of a July 28 letter from Deputy Transportation Secretary James F. Ports Jr. Ports wrote that “any major transportation project requested that is not accompanied with the required information detailed in this letter by August 15 will not be considered for funding” in the six-year capital plan.
Henson said the letter “was not as clear as it could have been.”
“What we wanted to get across very clearly is that we are beginning the preliminary scoring [of transportation projects] right now,” and the department needs any additional data that counties want considered in the ranking by Aug. 15, she said. A draft version of the new six-year capital plan, which covers fiscal years 2017 through 2022, is due to be released Sept. 1.
“The urgency we were trying to get across to the counties is we want them to be a part of the process,” she said. Projects that score low based on the new ranking system could be de-funded, she said.
Some local officials had worried they would not be able to assemble all the requested information in time. Among the dozen items listed in the letter were traffic impact, air quality and environmental impact studies for each major project.
A spokesman for Anne Arundel County Executive Steve Schuh said the county government would still work to “provide as much information as possible.”
Schuh was among those who opposed the transportation scoring law, which General Assembly Democrats passed over Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto.
Democrats said the measure is designed to increase transparency in the transportation project selection process. The new scoring system is required to rank projects based on nine listed goals, including safety, environmental stewardship, community vitality and equitable access to transportation.
Republicans, meanwhile, saw the change as an effort to diminish the Hogan administration’s decision-making power after the governor decided to jettison funding for the Red Line, a $2.9 billion east-west light rail project that would have run across Baltimore. They charged that the new scoring system would prioritize mass transit projects in the Washington and Baltimore metropolitan areas at the expense of highway improvements elsewhere.
The measure went through multiple changes before legislators settled on a set of nine goals and 23 criteria that officials must consider when scoring transportation projects. Henson said the department is working on a preliminary scoring system.