Stimulus Funds Support 12,000 Projects

Stimulus funds for transportation infrastructure have so far paid to complete more than 3,000 construction projects around the United States and are now supporting three times that many under construction.

Those numbers come from the latest oversight report from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, based on data as of Dec. 31.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act set aside $64.1 billion for expenditures under the committee’s jurisdiction. The report said nearly 17,000 projects totaling $56 billion have already been identified.

Most of those are under the Federal Highway Administration, which had the largest amount of stimulus funds to allocate. The report said FHWA has approved 10,668 projects totaling $23.3 billion, or 85 percent of the $27.5 billion it administers.

The committee identified 3,148 stimulus infrastructure projects that have been finished, at a value of $2.9 billion or 9 percent of available funds, and said 9,241 are currently under way worth $20.6 billion.

The earliest to be completed were the most “shovel ready,” said Deputy Transportation Secretary John Porcari, while those now being developed were more complex.

In addition, the Department of Transportation only last week named recipients for $1.5 billion in competitive grants, and President Obama unveiled $8 billion in passenger rail development grants just a few weeks earlier. Some of those will take years to spend out fully.

Other infrastructure spending that the committee tracks include repairs to barge locks and commercial ports on the inland waterway system by the Army Corps of Engineers, plus Coast Guard grants to improve and alter several aging railroad bridges over navigable rivers and to upgrade boilers on eight cutters.

Contact John D. Boyd at jboyd@joc.com.