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Alabama DOT plans to set criteria for municipalities seeking funding for road projects, following concerns raised about lack of local matches. Projects totaling $40 million were approved, with emphasis on transportation impacts rather than matching funds. Rural areas struggle with tax revenue constraints.
Wed January 22, 2025 - Southeast Edition #3
The Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) plans to research ways of evaluating the financial situation of municipalities seeking funding for road projects.
The move came after a meeting of the Alabama Transportation Rehabilitation and Improvement Program II (ATRIP II) committee on Jan. 16, where one legislator suggested criteria to determine whether a local government should put up matching funds for state money.
"We will put something together," Edward Austin, the chief engineer of ALDOT, told the committee, made up of lawmakers from both chambers of the Alabama Legislature, including senior leadership and budget chairs.
The Alabama Reflector reported that Austin then proposed that the group meet once again after the Legislature gavels the end of the current 2025 legislative session.
"We need to have these criteria nailed down before we send out the calls for applications next year," he said, and committee members agreed.
ATRIP II members are responsible for approving transportation projects through a program aimed at rehabilitating and improving the transportation infrastructure "by funding projects of local interest, proposed by one or more local governments."
The proposal to consider a municipality's ability to contribute funding toward a project arose after one of the committee's members, state Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, chair of the Senate Finance and Taxation Education Committee, expressed concerns that nine of the 22 projects before him did not have a matching contribution by the municipality that requested the project.
In the past, only a handful of proposals were submitted without a match, Orr said, and he wanted to know if a policy existed that considered the contribution made by the municipality.
"I always like to stretch the dollars," he told members of the committee. "We have limited money."
Orr then proposed several additional factors that the committee could incorporate into the evaluations to decide which projects could receive funding, including need, the size of the community and the local poverty rate.
John Cooper, Alabama's transportation director, told Orr that the law does not state that a matching fund is required for local governments to submit project proposals that would be eligible for state funding.
"When we do our work, we do not try to press on anybody any obligation to match. Therefore, we could appear to be all over the waterfront because that is what they choose to do," Cooper explained. "We just simply do not try to enforce a match."
The Alabama Reflector noted that ALDOT's Austin said a municipality's ability to offer some financial contribution to a project is considered but is not weighed heavily in the consideration.
"When we have been asked to prioritize projects, we are looking at it strictly from a transportation standpoint," he explained. "What are the projects we feel, as ALDOT, have the most impact based on the transportation criteria that we look at?"
Once that is done, if there are two or three projects with a similar priority profile, then the matching is taken under consideration, he said.
Austin cited a $2 million Limestone County project that does not have an accompanying match from the local government. However, the work is moving forward, he said, because the stretch of roadway covered by the project is dangerous and needs to be improved.
A number of the projects without a match were proposed by local governments in rural areas, many of which do not have the tax revenue to contribute as matching funds, Austin told the ATRIP II committee.
"I would say [do] not do that … this period because the applications have come in with a certain set of rules and regulations," ATRIP II committee member Sen. Vivian Davis Figures, D-Mobile, told Austin. "If we are going to do that, I think we should set up some type of criteria by which everybody would be treated fairly, like what is the amount of income that a county brings in, or the tax revenue that it brings in."
In all, 22 new projects across Alabama were approved that totaled approximately $40 million, a figure that was broken down this way: