U.S. states to use stimulus for transportation projects

Kansas will widen the U.S. 69 highway to remove a bottleneck outside Kansas City, along with a few other expensive projects. Maryland will spend its money in smaller pieces, resurfacing dozens of rutted roads and highways. Colorado will build an interchange on Elk Creek Road in Jefferson County, complete with an underpass for the elk.

There is nothing monumental in President Barack Obama's plan to revive the economy with a coast-to-coast building spree, no historic New Deal-style public works. The goal of the stimulus plan was to put people to work quickly, and so states across the country have begun to spend nearly $50 billion on thousands of smaller transportation projects that could employ up to 400,000 people, by the administration's estimates.

More than a dozen states have now said how they plan to spend at least some of their transportation money, giving the clearest picture yet of how one of the president's signature programs is playing out around the country.

Beyond all the money for Medicaid and unemployment benefits in the huge bill passed in February, this will be the face of America's stimulus program: a bridge will be painted on a rural road, a new lane added on a suburban highway, a guardrail built on a median strip.

They may be old plans that the recession had forced a state to shelve, but multiplied by thousands, they will quickly get bulldozers rolling again and paychecks flowing. On the highway projects alone, the White House said Tuesday that 150,000 jobs would be created or saved.
Some states are taking radically different approaches with their transportation money. While Kansas is using it on a few big marquee projects to expand capacity at several highways, Maryland has adopted a fix-it-first policy, and plans to use its money to repair dozens of roads and bridges instead of building new ones.


The work, however mundane much of it is, cannot come too soon for a construction industry buffeted by an unemployment rate that has risen to twice the national average as many states cut back on building.

Mike Gibson, the executive director of Associated Contractors of New Mexico, a trade group, said that his state had lost 4,500 highway construction jobs in the past year.

"We have lost the equivalent of a plant closure," Gibson said.

"When you lose 10 jobs here, 100 jobs here, it adds up very quickly."

States have tremendous latitude in how they spend the money, and in some places that is leading to pitched political battles - battles that must be waged quickly, since the states must begin spending the money in four months. Regional politics is playing a role in some states, as local lawmakers fight to get money sent to their districts.

Since the stimulus law provided much less money for transportation than many states had expected - less than $50 billion, which is about what the federal government spends on transportation every year - the competition for those dollars can be particularly fierce.

Two schools of thought are emerging as states decide what to do with their shares.

Kansas decided to concentrate its money on a few new projects that its transportation secretary, Deb Miller, called "game changers." So it will spend nearly a quarter of its money building the next leg of a project to expand U.S. 69 in Overland Park, a bustling suburb of Kansas City. It will rebuild an interchange in Wichita in an area where developers want to put more retail space, rebuild a rural highway in Gove County that has heavy truck traffic, and complete a 10-year project to improve a corridor in McPherson County where work was stopped because the money had dried up.

"We wanted to build projects that would have a lasting impact, so that 20 years later people could look at them and see what we did," said Miller, who added that the department was considering making plaques to show that the projects had been paid for by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the official name of the stimulus law.

Others argue that the money should be used to fix the crumbling infrastructure that already exists. They note that for years, many states have put off much-needed maintenance to save money, and that repair projects can be done quickly.

In the absence of a broader policy discussion about the future of transportation - which would involve wrestling with questions about sprawl and how to reduce dependence on foreign oil - these states have decided it is better to fix existing roads than to build new ones that would only attract more cars.

src:http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/04/america/states.php