Metro won’t be using stimulus money on rail

As reported in the Chronicle

By ROSANNA RUIZ
March 23, 2009

As county leaders press forward with Grand Parkway plans, Metro leaders are looking for a Plan B for two rail lines they had planned to use federal economic stimulus money to help fund.

Metro’s pitch to fund the North and Southeast lines with stimulus funds fell short of the feds’ scheduling mandate.

Metro proposed to “get the ball rolling,” within 90 days, according to its brochure requesting $410 million in stimulus dollars. The transit agency also said $70 million could be used to convert 83 miles of high-occupancy vehicle lanes into high-occupancy toll lanes.

Last week, Metro leaders said they learned that federal transit authorities preferred the $92 million it will receive in stimulus funds be used primarily on the HOV conversion.

The two rail lines are not at the appropriate stage to satisfy a requirement that 50 percent of the funds be obligated by Sept. 1.

All of the funds also must be spent in a year, and the projects must be complete in three years, according to the Federal Transit Administration’s Web site.

High hopes?

There are use-it-or-lose-it provisions in the stimulus package as the Obama administration has made clear these projects should get started sooner.

Did Metro aim too high?

“We don’t think we overshot the mark,” Metro spokeswoman Raequel Roberts said. “We submitted a project that we believed would qualify for stimulus funds.”

Metro remains several months from final federal approval for those lines.

Perhaps, Metro was simply too optimistic, as Alan Clark, of the Houston-Galveston Area Council, suggested.

“They might have been a little bit hopeful they could do something with stimulus money to advance the rail project,” said Clark, HGAC’s transportation planning manager. “I don’t blame them at all.”

Planning the Parkway

The default project to transform HOV lanes into toll lanes for solo drivers was tabled by Metro’s board of directors last week, but the proposal will be taken up again next month.

Meanwhile, county leaders are wasting no time on the Grand Parkway as the clock continues to tick on the $181 million in stimulus funding allocated for the project.

The 185-mile proposed outer loop around Houston that has been under consideration for more than two decades. Now that it has an infusion of stimulus funds, planners are in frenzy mode to meet pressing deadlines. Seventeen design and engineeringcontracts related to the Grand Parkway are on this week’s Commissioner’s Court agenda.

“A year ago, no one was expecting to implement this project quite on this time frame,” Clark said. “TxDOT and Harris County are working like crazy to get the pieces wrapped up so it can be let to contract within the 12-month period.”

Lawsuit pending

The county still must acquire about 30 properties totaling about 650 acres of land for Segment E of the toll project, which would connect the Katy Freeway and U.S. 290.

County leaders are keenly aware that a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club potentially could delay the project and preclude use of the stimulus funds. The lawsuit argues that prairie land should not be disturbed.

All of which may make the project sound a little less than “shovel-ready,” one of the primary criteria for stimulus funding.

“I’m not the one that makes the definition,” said Dave Gornet, executive director of the Grand Parkway Association, a group charged by the Texas Transportation Commission with advancing the parkway project. “The state has decided in their terms it is shovel-ready and they have allocated the funds.”

TxDOT’s Texas Transportation Commission gave its approval earlier this month to the projects compiled by its district offices with the help of local planning officials, agency spokesman Chris Lippincott said.

The commission “would not have approved the recommendations had they believed they were setting the state up for failure,” he said. “The buck stops with the commission, but the expertise and the double checking of the math occurred at the staff level.”