A road under construction. The Alabama Department of Transportation will consider criteria for determining whether a local government should put up matching funds for a state transportation project after a request from legislators on Thursday. (Getty Images)
The Alabama Department of Transportation will 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, 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 for the Alabama Department of Transportation, told the committee, composed of lawmakers from both chambers of the Alabama Legislature, including senior leadership and budget chairs.
Austin then proposed that the group meet once again after the Legislature gavels the end of the 2025 legislative session.
“We need to have these criteria nailed down before we send out the calls for applications next year,” Austin said, and members agreed.
The committee is 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, Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, the 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.”
He 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, the state’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 said. “We just simply do not try to enforce a match.”
Austin said that 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,” Austin said. “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 considered.
Austin cited a $2 million Limestone County project that does not have an accompanying match from the local government. But the project is moving forward, he said, because the stretch of roadway covered by the project is dangerous and needs to be improved.
Austin also told the committee that many 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.
“I would say not do that with this period because the applications have come in with a certain set of rules and regulations,” said Sen. Vivian Davis Figures, D-Mobile, one of the committee members. “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 total, 22 new projects were approved that totaled about $40 million. The east central region was approved for $6.7 million, the west central region for $7.5 million, the southeast region had $9 million worth of projects approved and the southwest region had $8 million.
The rest of the money was committed to the northern part of the state, which has some of the most populated areas of Alabama.
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