Dallas Wins, Fort Worth Loses on TIGER Streetcar Funds

February 17, 2010 at 10:04 am | Transit & Infrastructure | Tags: , , , ,

The US Department of Transportation has announced the winners of the TIGER recovery fund grants this morning. The complete list of winners can be view here (PDF link).

Both Fort Worth and Dallas had applied for TIGER funds to help with the construction of their respective modern streetcar systems. Dallas has won $23 million for the downtown Dallas streetcar line it’s been planning. Fort Worth won nothing for our own modern streetcar system.

Other streetcar projects which won TIGER funds besides Dallas include Tucson, New Orleans, and a reworking of a segment of the Portland streetcar.

Not much info just yet on what kept Fort Worth out of the running. More to come, certainly. The city has also applied for a New Starts grant from the Federal Transit Administration, the outcome of which we won’t know until later in the year.

Update: The Star-Telegram’s transportation blog has some more, including remarks from Tarrant Co. Judge Glen Whitley on why we may have lost, and the possibility that the grant goes to both Fort Worth and Dallas but Dallas gets listed solo because of the ages-old “Fort Worth is part of Dallas, right?” mentality.

If Fort Worth doesn’t get a slice of the pie, Whitley blamed petty politics — Tarrant County is SLIGHTLY redder than Democrat-blue Dallas County. He said it was time for people in both parties to start working together to solve transportation problems.

“You happen to be in the reddest of counties,” Whitley told about 500 people at the Northeast Tarrant County Transportation Summit Wednesday morning in Grapevine. “The only county redder than Tarrant County in the U.S. is Orange County in California. The happenstance that we were eliminated I’m sure is coincidental. We’ve got to stop the partisanship. We’ve got to start going what’s best for the region, and stop putting up with this …”

One other explanation may be that the award was meant for both cities, but that Dallas was the only city listed … perhaps an oversimplification, often held by many nonresidents that the entire North Texas region is “Dallas.”

We don’t like getting overtly political here on Fort Worthology, but we feel like Whitley’s thoughts about this being a red-county-vs.-blue-county thing are newsworthy and worth bringing up.

Update 2: Quoth somebody who’s heard from people in the city: “confusion reigns.” It seems that North Central Texas Council of Governments does not know if USDOT means for the grant to be solely for Dallas, or split between the Dallas and Fort Worth projects. Sounds like real miscommunication between the feds and local officials. It is not known if USDOT has really picked Dallas alone or just used Dallas because they forgot to mention Fort Worth because of the “Dallas area” mindset. More to come.

Update 3: The Observer seems to have confirmed it: the money is for Dallas only.