Steelmanning Reauthorization: Way More Than You Wanted to Know III
TEA-21 (1998)
Reference (will be at the top of every post):
Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?
Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?
Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?
Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?
Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?
TEA-21:
“Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century” (1998)
Seven years after ISTEA…new tea for the next century. It took 7 years to reauthorize federal funding for transportation, and then seven more to get us to SAFETEA-LU in 2005. The margins between funding paradigms and parameters continued to increase as priorities became more complex with multimodalism, federalism, and technology needs.
Power: State >> Local >> Regional >> Federal. Bike/ped-specific funding was identified for the first time here, which brought the Federal fight to the street level, which is, by definition, local. Funding is still allocated to the State (or MPO) first for passthrough and stickyfingers, but the increased focus on the human-powered transportation starts to tell a story that hadn’t been prologued before.
Mode: Focus and funding still on highways (fun fact, this still hasn’t changed) but there exist new and more programs to that focus on other modes, transportation “enhancements,” bike/ped funding specifically for the first time, recreational trail funding. scenic byways -- this bill specifically calls out these sub-modal programs for the first time and sets the stage for the future of a national vision.
Complexity: Added modal support means added complexity. TEA-21 added additional guidance for MPOs. The bill also introduces a narrower focus on ITS, or “intelligent transportation systems.”
Flexibility: “With the ‘intermodality’ mandate comes the need to match with appropriate flexibility; this is necessary on a two-axis basis. One: modal, including the flexibility of funds to be used for capital and operating costs and shifting between highway spending and *other* spending and two: state and local. This bill devolves a lot of the spending “”priorities”“ to state and local decisions. Good on paper, challenging in practice. Standard spending paradigms helps USDOT understand what’s working at the expense of solving local problems.
Also in TEA-21: the establishment of TIFIA for infrastructure finance. For the first time the federal government will issue and secure debt financing for eligible transportation projects. Debt enhances the resiliency of the system by filling market gaps and leveraging local dollars for projects that can self-sustain or attract statewide debt service monies.
TEA-21 also established state infrastructure banks (SIBs) pilots, capitalized with at most 20% federal funds and 80% non-federal funds.
Geography: Several thousand earmarks in TEA-21 and an even greater oversight of what an MPO's responsibilities are vis-à-vis regional planning and coordination with state DOTs.
TEA-21 aaaaalso established the idea of a Minimum Guarantee that formalized the return of surface transportation formula funds to states to be set at 90.5% of the amount it puts in and adds other guards to ensure geographic parity.