The Brooklyn Bridge needs work. New York City planners want to rebuild the ramps from the FDR highway and repaint the landmark structure. The project will cost about $380 million (”painting a bridge is more expensive than you’d think,” noted one source) and could create something on the order of 10,000 new jobs — a welcome prospect in a cash-strapped city with an unemployment rate above 6 percent.
All in all, a fine candidate for stimulus dollars. So how does Mayor Bloomberg secure some of that sweet, sweet federal lucre? The process, based on the famously bureaucratic funding system used in the omnibus transportation bills that crawl through Congress once or twice a decade, is likely to go something like this:
1. Make sure it’s “shovel-ready” - Like most of the projects that eventually will be funded by the stimulus package, this one has been on the drawing board for a while. The design and planning stages are already complete as is most of the permitting. The remaining big step is to get the plan approved by the state, which acts as a gatekeeper to the federal money. While getting state approval can sometimes be a protracted affair, in this case city officials are hoping that the process will be speedy and that they will have the required paperwork in hand shortly.
2. Federal formulas, Part 1 – At the moment, it looks like about $40 billion (or about 5 percent) of the proposed $825 billion stimulus package will go to transportation infrastructure. Historically, 80 percent of that money would be earmarked for roads and bridges and the rest to rail and mass transit. Now that balance seems to be shifting slightly toward transit in this bill, leaving $30 billion for roads and bridges. If past funding formulas are used–and David Obey, who heads the House Appropriations Committee indicated earlier this month that they would–this pot of money will be divvied up among the fifty states using to a formula that factors in population and road use patterns. New York state can expect to see about $1.35 billion.
3. Federal formulas, Part 2 - In traditional highway bills, a federal rule dictates that 15 percent of national roads funding should be spent on bridges. New York, as a state with a lot of bridges, gets an outsized share of that money. However, indications are that in the case of the stimulus package, there will be no set aside for bridges — that they will compete on even footing with roads projects. So while this would be a factor under usually funding circumstances, in this case it seems not to be relevant.
4. State formulas - How the states handle transportation money is, within certain limits, up to them. Some states give wide latitude to the governor – if he or she wants to blow every available cent on a ten lane highway to the middle of nowhere, that’s fine by the feds. But New York law requires that federal transportation dollars be sprinkled around the state according to yet another formula designating that 38 percent of the haul be spent in New York City. So for all it’s road and bridge projects the city might see something in the range of $510 million in stimulus money. Of course, this is in addition to the federal funds that are already flowing to the state and city under the huge multi-year transportation bill that passed in 2005.
5. Haggling - Getting the project added to the state’s list of approved shovel-ready projects is a matter of negotiation between municpal and state authorities. In this case, it’s handled through the auspices of what’s known as a “metropolitan planning organization” — in this case the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council. Bloomberg News recently described MPOs as groups that “operate in obscurity and allow the political horse-trading to go on unimpeded by real oversight.”
6. Getting to work - If and when the funding has been lined up, the city will advertise the project, collect bids, and–as required by municipal law–assign the work to the lowest bidder. But even at that point, it won’t see any money. Rather, the city fronts all payments to the contractor and later invoices the state. In turn, the state invoices the feds. The state is known to “dally” sometimes in taking care of its paperwork, which tends to mean the city doesn’t get paid for a while. As the money eventually comes through, it does so in the form of wire transfers.
In this case, if all goes well, the project will start creating jobs for New Yorks later this year and by 2012 drivers, cyclists and pedestrians can expect to be crossing the East River on a better looking and better functioning bridge.
