The United States Department of Transportation said yesterday that the seventh round of its TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) competitive grant program was rolled out with $500 million available for national transportation projects.
The objective of the TIGER program is to ensure that economic funding is rapidly made available for transportation infrastructure projects and that project spending is monitored and transparent.
DOT said the 2015 TIGER grants will fund capital investments in surface transportation and infrastructure and are awarded on a competitive basis to projects that will have a significant impact on the nation, a region, or metropolitan area. And DOT added that the funding will continue to make transformative surface transportation investments by providing significant and measurable improvements over existing conditions, with the grant program focused on capital projects that generate economic development and improve access to reliable, safe and affordable transportation for communities, both urban and rural.
The DOT’s recently-proposed GROW AMERICA Act proposes to doubling funding for the TIGER grant program at $7.5 billion over six years.
“The TIGER program has funded innovative projects, sparked new partnerships, created intermodal connections and enabled hard-to-fund projects that are changing the face of communities all across the country,” said Secretary Foxx. “We are excited to kick off this year’s competition. The consistent number of high quality projects we’re unable to fund through TIGER every year demonstrates the need for Congress to act to give more communities access to this vital lifeline,” Secretary Foxx said. “That is why we proposed doubling TIGER in the GROW AMERICA Act.”
Going back to its inception in 2009, DOT said the TIGER grant program has doled out a cumulative $4.1 billion for 342 projects in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Over the previous six rounds, DOT received more than 6,000 applications for TIGER grant funding that requested more than $124 billion for transportation projects.