Dear CAGTC Members,
On December 17, the House passed an omnibus bill containing eight appropriations bills for fiscal year 2020 (FY20), including the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) bill. The legislation, providing funding through September 30, 2020, passed by a vote of 297-120. You can find the full text of the bill here and an explanatory statement here.
The bill provides $86.2 billion in total budgetary resources for USDOT, $324.9 million below FY19 appropriations. The BUILD grant program is funded at $1 billion, $100 above FY19 levels. Consistent with last year’s requirements, the bill calls for a 50-50 split in project selections between urban and rural areas, mandates that USDOT use the selection criteria as outlined in the 2017 notice of funding opportunity, and stipulates that USDOT not consider a project’s federal share or ability to generate non-federal revenue during the selection process. As in FY19, $15 million of BUILD funding is set aside for planning grants. While these grants were previously optional, the FY20 bill requires USDOT to award the reserved funds for planning grants. The explanatory statement notes that “the agreement does not include the requirement in the House report to refocus fiscal year 2020 awards on multimodal projects, but does continue to make these projects eligible for awards,” though the House recommendation seemed to advocate for transit, passenger rail, and pedestrian improvements rather than multimodal freight.
The Port Infrastructure Development Program will receive $225 million, $67.7 million less than in 2019. Last year, roughly 30 percent of this program’s funds were reserved for grants toward the “15 coastal seaports that handled the greatest number of loaded foreign and domestic twenty-foot equivalent units of containerized cargo in 2016.” For FY20, MARAD is directed to award at least $200 million to coastal seaports or Great Lakes ports, and prioritize ports that “handled less than 10,000,000 short tons in 2017” for grant awards under $10 million. While the 2019 NOFO set $10 million as the minimum grant size, no minimum was specified in the FY19 appropriations legislation. This year, Congress included language listing the minimum award amount as $1 million. There are no maximum grant amount specifications.
The CRISI grant program will receive $325 million, $70 million above FY19 levels. The bill provides that $45 million of CRISI funds will be awarded to projects that “require the acquisition of rights-of-way, track, or track structure to support the development of new intercity passenger rail service routes.”
A total of $1.15 billion is made available for bridge replacement and rehabilitation investments, an large increase compared to the $475 million provided in FY19. The funds will be distributed based on the “percentage of total deck area of bridges classified as in poor condition.” States for which this number is below 5 percent will each receive $6 million for highway bridge replacement or rehabilitation projects. The remaining funds will be allocated to the states with higher percentages of bridges in poor condition. No single state may receive more than $50 million under this program.
The omnibus will now proceed to the Senate for a final vote and President Trump is expected to sign the legislation into law prior to the Friday, December 20 midnight deadline when the stopgap appropriations measure currently in place is set to expire.
Thank you,
Cecile
Cecile Entleitner
Manager, Member Communications & Policy
Coalition for America’s Gateways and Trade Corridors
1625 K Street NW
Suite 1100
Washington, DC 20006
tradecorridors.org
(202) 828-9100