The sprawling transportation bill moving through the Legislature is primarily meant to give cities and towns money needed to repair roads and bridges, but an administration official framed it Tuesday as a bridge of its own, too.
The Transportation Committee’s redrafted version of a bill that began with Gov. Maura Healey (H.5279) authorizes $1.4 billion in new bond financing, including $300 million for the annual Chapter 90 outlay of local road maintenance funds, $500 million for bridge and pavement asset management, and more.
But while the Healey administration views the legislation as “primarily a Chapter 90 bill,” it would also serve as a “refill” of four of the most popular parts of 2022’s $11.3 billion transportation infrastructure bond law, said Jennifer Sullivan, undersecretary at the Executive Office for Administration and Finance.
The bill contains language increasing previously authorized spending and bonding caps from the 2022 law, effectively creating about $3.2 billion in new capacity for four programs. That would “tide us over until the next comprehensive transportation bond bill, which will probably be in the next legislative session,” Sullivan said.
“Only in transportation can a $5 billion bill be a small and temporary measure. … A typical transportation bond bill would be much more extensive,” she said, referring to the total borrowing authorized by Healey’s bill.
The bill that was before the Joint Committee on Bonding, Capital Expenditures and State Assets on Tuesday would provide $2.3 billion in additional spending for federally aided highway projects authorized in the 2022 law, $800 million in additional spending for non-federally aided road and bridge projects included in the 2022 law, $65 million in additional spending for the Municipal Pavement Program and $12 million more for the Shared Streets and Spaces Program. It also greenlights proportional increases in the aggregate bond authorization caps included in the 2022 law.
Sullivan said reauthorizations are meant to keep projects advancing until the state undertakes the next, more comprehensive, transportation bond bill. She said it “really doesn’t represent a change in cash flows or anything that’s in the capital plan.”
The way federally aided highway projects work was a key consideration. When the Department of Transportation awards a contract for a highway project — often for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars — it “locks up” the bond authorization required to pay the entire life of the contract, she said.
“It’s an important fiscal control. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to spend it all in the next six months, but it does mean that we need to set it aside. And so we wanted to give them a good margin to make sure that they could proceed with all of their planned work in those four categories until we get another transportation bond bill,” Sullivan told the committee. “It will hopefully take the pressure off of you and your colleagues, so that the next time we file a transportation bond bill, we don’t tell you, ‘Oh, and by the way, we need this back in a couple of months, or it will slow down our construction.'”
Cassandra Gascon, MassDOT’s chief of municipal aid and partnerships, said the Municipal Pavement Program is incredibly popular. It provides money and technical assistance for towns to improve municipally owned portions of state-numbered routes.
“This is a really key program for us as cities and towns are collectively responsible for more than 1,700 miles of state-numbered routes. And just to give you a sense of the Municipal Pavement Program’s success since it launched in 2021, just five years ago, $125 million has been invested over 615 roadway miles across the state,” she said. “If we can keep that up, we have the potential to improve nearly every single mile of municipally owned state-numbered routes within the next five years, which would be incredible. I cannot overstate the positive feedback we’ve received about this program as well. … Last year — this is my favorite — we even had one town tell us that what we accomplished in one construction season would have taken them 10 years to complete alone.”
Gascon said the Shared Streets and Spaces Program that stands to gain an extra $12 million launched in 2020 as a part of the pandemic response and supports “creative solutions to unique municipal transportation needs.” By sheer number of applications, it is one of MassDOT’s most popular grant programs, and she said the reauthorization would allow for about 100 more grants to be issued.