City Council revamps how it gets transportation money

get millions of federal transportation dollars. abc-7’s maria garcia has been following this story for weeks. she’s live with an update. maria? i showed you how the city had been submitting transportation projects that were not ready for federal dollars. but the projects were city council favorites. now the city says it won’t be playing favorites. 16-21 14:23 we were submitting faulty applications. we were submitting projects that werent’ ready to go. city rep claudia ordaz brought up the issue a few weeks ago. that’s when we learned city council wasn’t properly preparing transportation projects which were up for tens of millions in federal money. 11:59 we didn’t have a process set in place to make sure everything was getting done. the federal dollars go through the metropolitan planning organization – which chooses who gets the money based on need and how ready the project is for construction. 06:05 we want to be ready. we don’t want to be scrambling at the last minute the city was scrambling before when it submitted projects for funding. it wasn’t finishing preliminary work – like environmental reviews. and it also wasn’t funding the mandatory 20- percent match up- front. 08:12 we need to start moving ahead of the game and not behind the game and moving ahead means the city council will have to put politics aside. no more choosing projects that are council favorites but not ready. and they’ll also complete environmentl reviews before submitting projects. 13:50 i feel this should have been done further back in time 13:56 i’m glad that we’re now being a little more transparent with the process / this is going to impact the city’s budget. because the city is putting up that 20-percent match up front. and in some cases, even more than that to have a better chance of getting federal dollars. plus it’ll budget for a little more in case the project’s cost goes up. maria, live in our newsroom, thank you.