Arizona officials designate a notoriously congested stretch of desert highway through tribal lands as the Wild Horse Pass Corridor, a designation that has less to do with horses than with the busy casino of the same name, located just north of where the highway crosses narrowed to four lanes.
With the support of the Gila River Indian Community, the state has committed or raised approximately $600 million of a nearly $1 billion plan to improve the bottlenecking 26-mile stretch of I-10 between Phoenix and Tucson would widen.
But his offer of federal grant money under the new infrastructure bill to complete the work fell short, and some roadwork advocates accused the Biden administration of devaluing those projects to focus on repairs and mass transit.
“Upset would be the correct terminology,” Casa Grande Mayor Craig McFarland said of his reaction upon learning that the project will not receive one of the law’s first mega grants that the U.S. Department of Transportation will announce this week. “We thought we had done a good job putting the proposal together. We thought we ticked all the boxes.”
Historic federal investments in infrastructure have revived dormant transportation projects, but debate over how to prioritize them has only intensified in the 14 months since President Joe Biden signed the measure.
The law follows decades of neglect in maintaining the country’s roads, bridges, water systems and airports. Research by Yale University economist Ray Fair estimates that a sharp decline in US infrastructure investment has resulted in a $5.2 trillion deficit. The entire bill, worth $1 trillion, is intended not only to address this dangerous project backlog, but also to expand broadband internet nationwide and protect against climate change damage.
However, some of the money has gone toward building new freeways — much of it from the nearly 30% increases Arizona and most other states will get over the next five years in formula funding that allows them to prioritize their own transportation needs.
For specific projects, many of the largest awards available by law come through a variety of highly competitive grants. The Department of Transportation received about $30 billion worth of applications for just the first billion in Mega Grants that were awarded, spokesman Dani Simons said.
An additional $1 billion will be available over the next four years before funding expires. Still, the first batch was closely watched for signals about government preferences.
Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, said it’s already clear that the Biden administration plans to direct more of its discretionary transportation funding to “nonhighway projects” than the Trump administration. With so much more overall infrastructure money to work with, Davis said, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
For example, one of the projects the administration has told Congress it has opted for a mega grant will widen Interstate 10 — but in Mississippi, not Arizona. Davis said the department likely prefers the Mississippi project because of its significantly lower price. This year’s Mega Grants combine three different award types into a single application, one of which is specifically targeted at rural and impoverished communities.
Some of the winning grants are for bridges, while others are for mass transit—including improvements to Chicago’s commuter rail system and a concrete encasement for a railroad tunnel in Midtown Manhattan.
Along with the nine projects selected, transportation department staff listed seven others as “highly recommended” — an accolade Davis said makes them clear front-runners for securing money next year. Arizona’s I-10 widening effort was part of a third group of 13 projects rated “recommended,” which Davis said could make them eligible for future funding unless outbid by even stronger applicants.
But such decisions remain largely subjective.
Proponents of regions like the Southwest, where populations are growing but more spread out, argue that their need for new or wider highways is as big a national priority as a big city’s need for more subway stations or bike lanes.
Arizona State Assemblyman Teresa Martinez, a Republican representing Casa Grande at the south end of the corridor, said she was furious when she heard from a congressional office that the government may have rejected the I-10 project because if this is not the case, there are enough “multimodal” components.
“What does that even mean?” She said. “… You wanted to fund projects that have bike lanes and hiking trails instead of a major highway?”
Testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in March, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg assured Arizona Democratic US Senator Mark Kelly that he understands the state’s unique highway needs and that his department “won’t stand in the way of expanding capacity on it.” is appropriate.”
However, some Republicans remain skeptical, in part due to a memo the Federal Highway Administration circulated in December 2021, a month after Biden signed the law into law. States proposed in the document should generally “priority to the repair, rehabilitation, reconstruction, replacement and maintenance of existing transportation infrastructure over the construction of new roads.”
Although administration officials dismissed the memo as an internal communication rather than a policy decision, critics claimed they were trying to bypass Congress and influence decisions on highway construction that have traditionally been left to states as part of their formula funding.
Last month, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the memo carries the same weight as a formal rule that Congress could challenge by passing an order of disapproval. West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito, the senior Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, promised to write one.
According to figures provided by the Federal Highway Administration to The Associated Press, 12 capacity expansion projects have received funding from previous competitive grants since the memo was published. The states have also used their formula funding for 763 such projects totaling $7.1 billion.