At the weekly club luncheon on Tuesday, October 6th,
the Kiwanis Club in Chipley was provided an overview
of transportation issues within the region by Larry
Kelley, recently retired District Secretary for FDOT
covering Northwest Florida. Kelley is a Chipley
native, earned an engineering degree from the
University of Florida in 1973 and started his 36
year career with FDOT.
During his career, he managed many different
programs that included Traffic Engineering,
Environmental Management, and Maintenance & Design.
From 1994 through 2006, he also held a concurrent
dual-role position as Emergency Operations Officer
in addition to his regular responsibilities.
Kelley covered four major topics during his
presentation: (1) 5-year transportation planning;
(2) Economic impacts on transportation; (3) the
stimulus program to date; (4) transportation future
trends. To paraphrase some of his major points:
“FDOT uses a 5-year transportation planning and
funding cycle, as well as longer-term periods for
strategic planning. The current 5-year plan is
updated annually and is the summary of actual funded
projects underway or about ready to start, and is
referred to as the “work plan”. Most of the work
plan is funded by gas revenues and the 16 county
Northwest Florida district gets about 9% of the
state total funding for work plans. The first
priority of work is preservation of existing
transportation infrastructure and only about 10% of
funding is left for new projects.
The depressed economic conditions have resulted in
lower gas tax revenues, and also vehicles have
become more efficient and alternative fuels are also
clearly in the future. There is exploratory
thinking about changing how fuel taxes are collected
by switching from a per gallon basis to some form of
use tax, perhaps measured in miles. The good news
economically is that construction costs have
declined by as much as 25% to 40%, which helps to
better use the shrinking funds for new projects.
So far, Northwest Florida has received about
$105,000,000 in federal stimulus money with about
70% allocated to state transportation projects and
30% awarded to local governments. The rules for
using the money are complicated and while about 600
projects were nominated, only 65 have actually been
funded. The big issue has been then local
governments had lists of projects, but had not been
doing the preliminary studies and planning over a
period of years so the projects were “shovel ready”
when the stimulus money became available. Local
governments need to do a better job with the capital
investment elements of their comprehensive plans.
Future trends could be characterized as changes to
the revenue sourcing by moving away from solely
gallonage collections; a need for more clearly
defined projects and year-to-year steps at all
levels to move projects forward; the emergence of
public-private partnerships for segments of the
transportation network, which for roads might mean
more toll-road segments; the 4-laning of FL Highways
77 and 79 will move forward in a series of short
segments every 4 to 5 years rather than long
segments until reaching I-10; impacts from the new
international airport will be not only in the local
area but throughout the regional transportation
network. Transportation projects will not see a
quick start-up as the economy improves, as there is
a growing backlog and new revenues will be smaller
than in past years.”
