This
press release from yesterday offers a good snapshot of the dollar figures for each program that MA will expect to receive from the BIL. It does require careful reading; as written it tends to conflate prior spending and reauthorizations with new money. Mostly, it appears to be using Federal dollars to fund previously programmed state funded projects. As part of this, MassDOT has published lists of what it intends to spend it's Formula BIL funding on:
this is the published list of Road and pedestrian projects, as well as
this list of bridges. It's mostly being spent on relatively small SOGR/ maintenance items, but does fully fund the 495/90 interchange using mostly federal instead of state funds.
Overall, the MBTA now has $580M for new programs which it is MBTA is currently reviewing options for investing the $580 million in the BIL’s additional formula funding, but that'll apparently mostly go to SOGR efforts. (Ooc, 2 years ago the backlog was $10.1B. With the OL, RL fleet renewals and GLT, how are we doing 2.5 years later?)
It does include the following snippet about EW rail, which sounds very intriguing if Albany is truly in the picture.
Given productive negotiations with CSX to enable increased passenger service, the Commonwealth intends to work with Amtrak to compete for funds to invest in service improvements between Springfield and Worcester as an initial step to expand service between Boston and Albany.
Presumably, and hopefully, by using Federal funds this way MassDOT has thus freed up state funds for programs that don't fit into the federal funding formula?
