Inside Chicago’s Fight for the Red Line Extension

Monday I wrote about the Chicago Transportation Authority hosting a meeting tomorrow morning to introduce disadvantaged business enterprises and small businesses to the three CTA-identified bidders for the Far South Side’s Red Line Extension Project as potential subcontractors. After I asked a colleague to review the article before publication, he had some interesting questions.

As Streetsblog has previously reported, the $3.6 billion RLE project has already made some significant progress with funding. In December the City Council approved the somewhat umpopular transit tax-increment financing district for the four-station, five-mile-long rail extension project. The TIF is projected to raise $959 million. In March, President Biden’s 2024 discretionary budget called for another $350 million. And on March 12, the CTA announced the three bidders: FH Paschen, Ragnar Benson, Milhouse and BOWA Joint Venture; Kiewit Infrastructure; and Walsh VINCI Transit Community Partners. 

But my colleagued wanted to know how the CTA was planning to get the remaining $2.3 billion for the RLE that made the agency confident enough to start looking for contractors. “What is the next step?” he asked. “What is the Federal Transit Administration [which funds and oversees public transportation projects nationwide] doing for CTA’s application for more money?”

I couldn’t answer that question immediately, so I hit up the CTA Media folks. Here’s an approximation of our email exchange.

John Greenfield: Can you tell me, what is the next step for making the Red Line Extension something that is definitely going to happen?  

CTA: As we move forward on the RLE project, we are working to pursue the necessary funding that will allow us to start planning the construction phase.

JG: The CTA has applied to the Federal Transit Administration for significant funding, correct? 

CTA: CTA is pursuing a federal grant through the Federal Capital Investment Grants (CIG) New Starts program. In March the Federal Transit Administration assigned the RLE project an overall New Starts project rating of Medium-High and recommended that Congress appropriate $350 million in FY2024 CIG funding for RLE. We are anticipating entry into the engineering phase (the next milestone) in June/July of this year. After successfully advancing through the CIG program, CTA anticipates receiving a Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA) from FTA in 2024. An FFGA commits the federal financial funding.

JG: How much are you asking for?

CTA: CTA is pursuing close to $2.4 Billion ($2.37 Billion) in Federal New Starts funding, which is 60 percent of  total project costs. We have also applied for $100 million of additional [Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality] funding.

JG: What is the FTA currently doing with that application? 

FTA is currently assessing the project’s readiness to approve the project into the next phase of the CIG Program – Entry into Engineering. Once CTA gets approved to enter Engineering, additional work will be needed to ultimately get FFGA next year.

Well there you it have it. It sounds like a project Far South Siders have been asking for since the Nixon era is well on its way to full funding.

The post What is the Federal Transit Agency doing for CTA’s application for more RLE money? appeared first on Streetsblog Chicago.

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source https://chi.streetsblog.org/2023/06/07/what-is-the-federal-transit-agency-doing-for-ctas-application-for-more-rle-money