State says it filed revised highway plan by March 1 deadline, but fails to post it online

The state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities says it filed a new version of the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program with the federal government Friday, but as of Sunday the department had not posted the changes online.

“Links coming soon! Thank you for your patience,” the transportation department says on its website.

The Federal Highway Administration has a month to review the document, which means that Alaskans won’t know until the end of March if there will be a normal road construction season this year.

This is the most serious management failure of state government under Dunleavy.

The department did not have a complete list this week on projects that will be removed from the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program.

Alaska is the only state that has failed to get a plan approved by the federal government on how it will spend federal dollars on transportation projects.

The potential failure to get federal approval could mean that federal money that was intended to be spent in Alaska could go to other states. Thousands of jobs are at risk because the Dunleavy administration failed to get this plan approved on a timely basis last year.

A year ago in May, Commissioner Ryan Anderson testified to lawmakers this week, the department abandoned its STIP planning process because it was not working after 15-16 months of work. The numbers on projects were not adding up and the state needed a new process, he said.

Anderson said the state “pivoted” to a new platform developed by state employees in a couple of months. “At that point in May we did expand the team,” Anderson said, bringing in people who had not gone through the federal process in the past.

Anderson continues to claim, despite evidence to the contrary, that the state STIP was rejected not because it was deficient in multiple ways, but because federal officials changed the interpretation of rules and regulations. He has not been convincing.

“This is our staff. This is, these are our people that are building the system and understanding it. And so far it has performed well. Any problems with FHWA (Federal Highway Administration) are really more related to how they’re interpreting information that, what they receive is a document that’s produced from this system,” Anderson told the Senate Finance Committee.

Since its rejection by the federal government, the state has had a team of 30 people working on the plan with a combined 300 years of experience, Anderson said. This does not make up for the lack of experience of those who prepared the plan that was rejected.

One of the issues facing the state is so-called “overprogramming,” which means approving projects for which there is not enough money to cover the costs.

“One of the big challenges we faced was being over $3 billion overprogrammed,” Anderson said.

“That was where a culmination of projects that kept slipping and then the inflationary environment that we’re in. We had some big projects, legacy projects. I mean, for example, Cooper Landing bypass, where cost estimates were skyrocketing on us. And really trying to look at the STIP from a perspective of we know we have to maintain healthy contracting communitities. We know there are needs out there that we have to get addressed. And how do we make these decisions when we have this $3 billion that we have to move to the right,” he said.

Moving $3 billion “to the right” means pushing projects off into the future.

“We had again, legacy projects, we want to get those done. Those projects that have been around for 20 years,” he said. “I mean those are things we need to get done, so we tried to keep focused on those as well.”

“But some of our challenges, you know, there’s been some new interpretations of some of the federal laws and regulations, we feel, that this STIP is different. We’re having to do some things differently than the last one,” he said.

One of the big things was on “fiscal constaint.” In the past, the state could add 30 percent to projects to deal with higher costs and delays because things rarely go the way it is planned.

“We’re now constraining every year to the revenue that’s being forecasted,” he said. That means limiting the plan to the amount of money expected to actually be available.

Anderson has claimed that it’s a new federal requirement that projects within the boundaries of a Metropolitian Planning Organization, such as those in Fairbanks and Anchorage, have to be approved by the local organization.

But the federal requirement has existed in the same format for nearly 30 years. Testifying to the Senate Finance Committee, Anderson invented an unlikely scenario to justify why he believes that the state should have the power to decide road projects.

“We’ve agreed to make some of these changes that they’ve asked,” he said of the federal agency, but that won’t be the end of it.

“We will move forward on resolving this conflict. And really what it comes down to is, I like to use the example of, let’s say we have a load coming from Kenai going to the North Slope. That truck, that vehicle is gonna go through three Metropolitan Planning areas that could have three different ways they want to, that they look at how a road should be planned. And we believe that you know, the state needs to maintain consistency on our National Highway System routes and we really need to keep that front focused. That was a big one for us and that’s something since the February 9th letter, we’ve really been hammering out.”

He may like to use that example, but it’s a bad one. There are not going to be three ways a road will be planned.

Meanwhile, state attorney Sean Lynch was asked what changed regarding the rules on the local planning organizations. Lynch was unwilling to back up the state claim that there is a new requirement regarding MPO approval of projects the state desires.

“I can’t really address what changed. It was, I guess from DOT’s perspective it was a, submitted a STIP as we always do and it was you know reported back as problematic and we tried to fix it and we are where we are,” said Lynch.

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