Road Rage: MetroWest Comes Up Short On Transportation Funding
Aside from following the Red Sox and the Pats, one of the most common leisure time activities in Massachusetts has to be grousing about the roads.
Ask any regular commuter, and you’ll get a list of pot holes, never ending construction zones and general traffic backups that make their drives to work miserable.
And now there’s one more reason to complain a little louder — particularly for commuters in the MetroWest region.
Short Shrift
Ask Sen. Karen Spilka, D-Ashland, about transportation funding, and you’ll get an earful. That’s because it’s a central issue for her and her region
The latest issue to get catch Spilka’s attention was a move by the Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization to cut two major MetroWest roadway projects from the group’s $2.4 billion regional transportation plan, which is a forward-looking document that outlines the area’s transportation priorities over the next 20 years. While it’s just a list, it’s an important one — if a project is cut from the list, it’s not eligible for federal highway dollars, or matching funds from the state.
The two projects that were likely to be cut included a $54 million grade separation project at the intersection of Routes 126 and 135 in Framingham, which is seen by city officials as a key improvement to alleviate traffic, as well as a $29.9 million plan to improve the hairpin on and off ramps at the intersection of Interstates 290 and 495.
In the end, the Route 126/135 interchange project remained on the regional planning document, while the I-290/495 interchange was a casualty. (See the map and list of projects that made the cut on the facing page.)
While Spilka is pleased that the Framingham project survived, she’s still advocating for big changes in the way the state hands out federal transportation dollars because, as she sees it, MetroWest continually gets the short shrift.
Currently, there are only three projects in MetroWest on the regional transportation plan from the Boston MPO — the Framingham project, improvements to Route 85 in Hudson and a project on Pulaski Boulevard in Hopkinton.
“Should Boston get the bulk of our transportation dollars? Undoubtedly yes,” Spilka said. “But, there needs to be a process in place that makes it fair. 495 is a lifeline to Central Massachusetts and by cutting that project out of this plan, they’re making it so that it’s much more difficult to get the needed state and federal funds.”
On The Road
Other advocates for the region, including the MetroWest/495 Partnership and state Rep. Danielle Gregoire, D-Marlborough, had mobilized when word spread this summer that the 290/495 project was at risk, but they lost their fight at the MPO’s meeting at the end of September.
Paul Matthews, executive director of the partnership, characterized the cut as “disappointing” and said that the project “deserves funding even in an era of diminished resources.”
For those businesses that depend of the region’s highways, the lack of investment continues to frustrate.
O.B. Hill Trucking of Natick is one such firm, which takes to the interstates daily with its fleet of about 25 vehicles.
Jennifer Grandoni, general manager of O.B. Hill Trucking and a board member of the Massachusetts Motor Transportation Association, points to the money that her industry pumps into federal coffers through the heavy vehicle use tax. While her trucks travel mostly into Boston, she said the I-290/495 intersection deserves attention.
“You would think that it would be a reasonable thing that they wouldn’t have hairpin turns on major highways,” she said.
A Little History
What many MetroWest advocates, including Spilka, point to when the issue of transportation funding for the region comes up is the 1970s era system that the state uses to dole out funds.
Back in the 70s, the federal government required states to create metropolitan planning organizations through which it would distribute highway dollars.
The Bay State decided to use the existing water and sewer planning organizations as a framework to create the MPOs.
MetroWest was then folded into the Boston MPO, which covers an expansive 101 communities, from Gloucester to Hopkinton to Scituate.
But to Spilka, demographics have shifted dramatically from the 1970s, when as she puts it, the region was basically “cow pastures and apple orchards.” Spilka has filed a bill to allow sub-MPOs to form, which would give the MetroWest communities an identity within the Boston MPO. Last year, she filed a bill trying to create a separate MetroWest MPO, but she said that measure proved too controversial.
For Marc Draisen, executive director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and vice chairman of the Boston MPO, the issue is less about regional equity and more about fundamental problems in the way Massachusetts funds its transportation projects.
For many years, the 290/495 intersection has been on the regional transportation plan and the project has even gone through some initial environmental permitting, according to Matthews.
However, the federal government came to the Boston MPO in December 2007 and said that its plan was not financially viable and that it needed to be trimmed, according Draisen.
Putting further pressure on MetroWest projects was the fact that the state was mandated to make room on the list for certain Big Dig mitigation projects.
After a year and a half of review, the MPO cut 17 projects, including the 290/495 work.
In total, Massachusetts was targeted to receive in excess of $630 million in federal transportation dollars for fiscal year 2009.
That number represents a promise from the federal government and typically comes in lower — around 95 percent — according to transportation experts. The funding mix for most highway projects is typically 80 percent federal with a 20 percent match from the state government.
From the view of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, there’s a hope that Massachusetts will receive more dollars in fiscal year 2010, which has not yet been authorized by congress.
Draisen said that the state has reached its borrowing capacity for funding transportation projects, yet the state legislature has been loath to allocate any taxpayer dollars.
All that borrowing is catching up to the state, according to Draisen.
“If I ran my house the way transportation is run in Massachusetts, I’d be homeless,” he said.
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