Understanding StarMetro’s bus funding.

Prepared by Samuel Scheib for the 26 June 2008 meeting of the TAC

There are a number of different funding mechanisms provided by the Federal Transit Administration that all start with the number 53 but this document focuses on 5307 and 5309 funds. FTA Section 5307 funds are non-discretionary funds, meaning they go out every year to eligible properties and are distributed to regions on an urbanized area formula that depends on the size of the urban area. 90.68% of the 5307 funding goes to cities of 200,000 people or more; 33% is for fixed-guideway projects (trains, basically) and 66% goes to the bus tier (like Tallahassee) which is broken down by non-incentive (90.8%) and incentive (9.2%) portions. Non-incentive just means the formula is based on population and revenue miles (50% revenue miles, 25% population, 25% population X density). 26.61% of that non-incentive bus tier money goes to cities under one million people. There remains 9.2% of the 5307 funds that are incentive-based on a formula that multiplies passenger miles by itself, divided by operating cost. It is a measure of performance and efficiency that provides a modest benefit to agencies that achieve higher levels of both.

In general, large urbanized-area-formula funds (the 90.68% chunk) can be used for transit capital purposes only, things like new buses or building facilities, not fuel or driver salaries (that is operating). (Small urbanized area formula funds can be used for both transit capital and transit operations.) There is about $2.2 million in 5307 funding available to StarMetro for capital expenses, including preventive maintenance for buses, administration (StarMetro’s Planner II position is paid by the FTA, not the city of Tallahassee), and the obligatory expenses of 1% safety and security and 1% transit enhancements, use them or lose them. The available balance may be used at the discretion of the transit agency. That amount at StarMetro is about $1.5 million and that has been used exclusively for buses and vans for the last several years.

FTA Section 5309 Bus funds are discretionary—essentially competitive—and earmarked by Congress. Earmarks are commonly known as pork and some famous projects like the bridge-to-nowhere in Alaska help to give earmarks a bad name; everyone hates them unless the earmark is for his or her own city. Then they are good.

FTA Section 5309 Bus funds can be used for capital projects such as replacement buses or expansion of bus facilities. In days gone by, getting 5309 money for bus replacements was a formality, a few papers to fill out, but today it is competitive and hard to get. Our city lobbyist must first be directed to work on behalf of StarMetro to get transit money (there are many other local needs for federal funding that the lobbyist also tries to get); he needs to convince our congressman that we are a high priority and should get an earmark. Rep. Boyd then has to get his earmarks through the congress. You can see from the excel spreadsheet how successful or unsuccessful we have been lately in comparison to Gainesville and Orlando (just two examples).

5309 bus replacement allocations by year
City	2008	2007	2006	2005	2004	2003	2002	2001
Orlando	$869,440	$802,560	$788,159	$0	$0	$0	$0	$0
Gainesville	$869,440	$802,560	$761,429	$971,779	$0	$0	$495,015	$0
Tallahassee	$0	$0	$0	$777,422	$402,027	$1,229,598	$0	$0

The 5309 money received in 2005 went to purchasing the Gilligs that StarMetro received in 2007, 9 40-foot buses and 1 29-foot bus. The City of Tallahassee purchased our five 2006 29-foot buses the previous year using concurrency money from Florida State (those are the spear buses) and the 2004 5309 funds. That means that in the last two years StarMetro got 15 new vehicles which is really quite good, but Taltran had purchased so many vehicles at once that we still have 20 1994 RTSs (now 14 years old) and 9 1996 RTSs (12 years old) in service, comprising more than half our fleet. We are some way off from relieving the pressure from Taltran’s massive bus purchases as seen in the parade of 94s below.