Changes To State Highway Funding Rules Passed During Lame-Duck Session

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Transportation Experts Say Measure Aims To Allow DOT To Avoid Federal Wage Requirements On Some Highway Projects

Thursday, December 6, 2018, 5:25am
By Rich Kremer

Legislation passed during the Legislature’s lame-duck session could change how Wisconsin pays for major highway projects. Transportation insiders say the tweaks are meant, by lawmakers, to be a way for the state to avoid federal wage requirements.

The first bill approved by lawmakers during this week’s extraordinary session makes changes to how the Wisconsin Department of Transportation funds highway megaprojects, like those in southeastern Wisconsin and other major state highway projects throughout the state, by requiring at least 70 percent of the project be funded with federal dollars.

Under current law, the DOT uses a combination of federal and state dollars, but for megaprojects and other major highway improvements there isn’t a set minimum for federal funds.

Former DOT Secretary Mark Gottlieb said that change is significant because federal funds carry with them federal requirements that contractors be paid wages set by the U.S. Department of Labor.

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Trump Cuts Leave Bridge and Rail Projects Hanging

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By HIROKO TABUCHI
APRIL 5, 2017

When President Trump pledged during the campaign to spend $1 trillion to restore America’s crumbling bridges and roads, supporters across the country cheered.

A leaked list of the Trump administration’s priority projects seemed to speak to the scope of the president’s ambitions: a high-speed rail line linking Houston and Dallas; a desalination plant in Orange County, Calif.; and improvements to the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana, the longest continuous bridge over water in the world.

Then came Mr. Trump’s budget proposal, which would slash the Department of Transportation’s spending by 13 percent, end subsidies for Amtrak’s long-distance trains and eliminate the Obama administration’s “Tiger” grant program, which has helped fund mass transit systems across the country.

Among the potential victims of the president’s proposed cutbacks: Maryland’s long-awaited Purple Line, a planned 16-mile light rail system through the capital’s suburbs.

Maryland had been just four days away from clinching some $900 million in federal aid in August when a federal judge ruled to temporarily invalidate environmental approvals for the project. But under President Trump’s plan, projects that don’t yet have complete federal funding agreements would be financed “by the localities that use and benefit from these localized projects.”

Supporters of the project are devastated.

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