"Rowdy" FAMPO Meeting Leads to Change in How Federal Congestion Mitigation Funding is Allocated
City officials say the new method does not take congestion into account.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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A new approach to distributing federal funds meant to help localities meet the requirements of the Clean Air Act is concerning some Fredericksburg area elected officials.
The policy committee of the Fredericksburg Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (FAMPO) voted narrowly last week to adopt a formula for allocating funds received through the federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality improvement program that is based on population per locality, rather than on a combination of population and daily vehicle miles traveled per capita.
Fredericksburg’s representatives on the policy committee supported taking into account daily vehicle miles traveled, because it would represent an attempt to measure the burden of congestion carried by the average resident. The city would have received a larger share of the annual funding under this measure.
However, as City Council member Will Mackintosh, the current vice chair of the FAMPO policy committee, said at last week’s Council meeting, “The committee voted against the unanimous opposition of the three [City Council members on the policy committee] to use direct population to divide those dollars among the three jurisdictions, which leaves the city with the short end of the stick.”
In response to these concerns, Council tasked City Manager Tim Baroody with drafting a letter on behalf of Mayor Kerry Devine to be sent to state Secretary of Transportation W. Sheppard Miller and Virginia Department of Transportation Commissioner Stephen Brich stating Council’s objection to the policy committee’s vote and “our strong sense that mitigation dollars need to be distributed according to a measure that takes congestion into account,” Mackintosh said last week.
The letter, which was sent this week, states the City’s belief that the new criteria “inaccurately applies funding contrary to the intent and purpose of [the congestion mitigation] funding.”
“Therefore, as the governing agency over this process, we ask that you advise the FAMPO Policy Board on ways to be fully compliant with federal and state regulations (and purpose/intent)” of the funding, the letter states.
FAMPO’s policy committee is made up of three elected officials from each of the three member jurisdictions—Spotsylvania, Stafford, and Fredericksburg. Mackintosh, along with Jannan Holmes and John Gerlach, represent Fredericksburg. Spotsylvania is represented by supervisors Chris Yakabouski, Drew Mullins, and Lori Hayes (the current policy committee chair), and Stafford is represented by supervisors Crystal Vanuch, Meg Bohmke, and Pamela Yeung.
Mullins and Hayes joined the three Stafford representatives in supporting the option to allocate congestion mitigation funding by population, rather than by population and the congestion estimate.
What is congestion mitigation funding?
FAMPO receives about $6.5 million annually from the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program and another federal grant—the Surface Transportation Block Grant—together. Each regional metropolitan planning organization is allowed to develop its own policy for how to allocate the funds, said Ian Ollis, FAMPO administrator and director of transportation planning for the George Washington Regional Commission.
In the Fredericksburg area, congestion mitigation funding usually gets used for bicycle and pedestrian projects, or to rebuild an intersection that’s not working well, Ollis said. It has also been used to purchase buses for local transit operations.
For several years, FAMPO’s process for allocating the congestion mitigation funds was for staff to score projects submitted by the jurisdictions and award funding to the projects that scored highest.
“It was a very complicated scoring mechanism,” Ollis said. “Projects with the highest scores would receive the funding irrespective of which jurisdiction the project was in, so it was possible that most of the money could go one year to one jurisdiction, then the next year to another.”
Jurisdictions could not depend on a set amount of funding each year, and the process of submitting and scoring projects was adding to the workload for both FAMPO and jurisdictional staff, Ollis said.
So FAMPO staff developed options for new ways to allocate the funding that would be predictable.
Last week, Ollis said, FAMPO staff asked the policy committee for guidance as to which of the four presented options it might prefer.
“We weren’t expecting a vote, just asking for advice,” Ollis said. “However, the policy committee decided to vote on which option they would prefer instead.”
Under the option selected by the committee, Fredericksburg will receive $284,493 in congestion mitigation funds per year—9.8% of the total grant funding. Stafford will receive $1.4 million, or 49.6%, and Spotsylvania will receive $1.2 million, or 40.6%.
Under the option taking both population and daily vehicle miles traveled into account, Fredericksburg would receive $475,749 in congestion mitigation funds, Stafford $1.3 million, and Spotsylvania about $1.1 million.
A regional partnership?
At last week’s City Council meeting, Mackintosh described the policy committee’s discussion about the potential options as “rowdy.”
In an interview with the Advance, he said the congestion mitigation funding is “meant to address regional traffic congestion issues.”
“I think it’s a real shame that the policy committee has chosen to allocate that money in a way that doesn’t take congestion into account,” he said. “In an era of constrained federal resources, it’s critical that we use resources effectively to address the real problems we face as a region, and the policy committee’s decision instead spends it in an inefficient and wasteful way.”
Yakabouski, a Spotsylvania supervisor who voted with the City representatives, said he thinks the option selected is too rigid and not in the interest of regional partnership.
The best way to maintain a regional partnership, he said, is for everybody to take a turn and “make sure that projects that need to be addressed to affect the regional problems that we have get addressed.”
“I think that we need more flexibility when it comes to funding,” Yakabouski said. “Part of the issue is that in the past—not with these policy committee members at all—but what we’ve had is greediness and a lot of talk about regionalism, but not a lot of action when it comes to actually doing it.”
He said the city has lots of congestion issues that are “not caused by city residents, but county residents going from one [jurisdiction] to the other.”
“We need to cooperate a lot more on that kind of stuff and stop going, ‘Well, jeez, Stafford got a bigger percentage than we did.’ Well, they needed a bigger percentage this time and we’re going to need a bigger percentage in the future,” Yakabouski said.
The City, in its letter, questions whether the adopted funding criteria is in compliance with the congestion mitigation and air quality program’s goals.
“We are confident that we can continue to work together in order to establish meaningful contributions to the region, but in order to accomplish this we need criteria that meet the purpose and intent of CMAQ for project evaluation and/or allocating funds,” the letter states. “We believe that discussion can happen within the FAMPO Policy Board with the review and additional guidance from VDOT. We would be grateful for the opportunity for further guidance in order to bring this topic up again at the next FAMPO meeting, to present our concerns further and to create a fair and compliant solution for this CMAQ funding issue.”
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