Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) The researchers have interviewed state DOTs first, and then interviewed regional governments to understand how functional silos can impact transportation resource allocation decisions. This is the result of an interview with a large metropolitan area regional government, the Regional Council of Governments, and the Metropolitan Planning Office (MPO) for the Kansas City area. The Kansas City metropolitan area consists of about 1.86 million people and is located along the Missouri River in both Kansas and Missouri. MARC was created by the local governments in the Kansas City region in the early 1970s, predating the federal requirement of having an MPO. MARC is the association of city and county governments consisting of eight counties and 116 cities in the bi-state (Kansas and Missouri) region. The MPO boundary is smaller than the MARC regional area, and includes the three core counties around the city of Kansas City, and parts of the four surrounding counties. We discussed barriers to resource allocation with David Warm (Executive Director of MARC), Mell Henderson (Director of Transportation), and Ron Achelpohl (Assistant Director of Transportation). When asked about functional silos acting as barriers to resource allocation, the respondents remarked on two issues that we believed to be both interesting and insightful. First, federal designation of funds was not generally seen as a barrier to allocating resources for the best use. There were some technical programs where some of the rules within the program created some inflexibility, but generally, federal funding designations emphasized programs that might not otherwise receive funding, but should be emphasized. For example, Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality (CMAQ) program provides funding for worthy improvement, which achieves the program’s objective, which might not otherwise receive funding. Federal designations and programs such as the CMAQ program and Enhancement funding were seen as positive federal programs leading to emphasis on valuable assets. Second, the lack of viable state level growth and land use guidance creates an impediment to good decision making on resource allocation. The lack of specific direction for land use and growth leaves the MPO without a policy to focus development, and sometimes this creates inefficient development or ineffective uses of transportation resources. About MARC and the Kansas City Area MPO MARC’s Board of Directors consists of 32 locally elected leaders representing the eight counties and 116 cities that are members of MARC. As a voluntary association, MARC fosters better understanding and cooperation on issues that extend beyond the jurisdiction of a single city, county or state. These issues include transportation, child care, aging, emergency services, public safety and 9-1-1, environmental issues and a host of others. MARC plays an active leadership role in strengthening the metropolitan community by providing: A forum for addressing regional objectives and diverse community issues; Long-range planning and public policy coordination; Technical assistance and services to enhance the effectiveness of local government. MARC’s board of Directors is the final point of decision for the agency, but it is advised by many committees and subcommittees. The principal transportation policy committee is the Total Transportation Policy Committee (TTPC). The TTPC is supported by various modal technical committees including the Aviation Committee, the BicyclePedestrian Advisory Committee, the Highway Committee, the Goods Movement Committee, and the Transit Committee. These committees generally consist of a mixture of elected and appointed officials and staff members representing interests of that specific mode. The Total Transportation Policy Committee (TTPC) advises the MPO Board of Directors on Transportation Issues, and is the policy board for the MPO. The Total Transportation Policy Committee (TTPC) serves as the local decision making and policy development body related to multi-modal transportation in the region. TTPC also operates as a forum for state and federal officials to communicate with local officials and representatives, as well as for citizens and members of the business community to address local officials about transportation-related issues. Also advising the TTPC are special interest committees. As an example, a transportation safety committee has evolved from direction from the Total Transportation Committee to include more safety oriented planning in the long range transportation plan. The transportation safety committee has evolved through funding from the Missouri DOT to include a safety advocacy which has generated some safety funds for the MPO, principally for enforcement and education activities, but their activities could be related to anything with respect to transportation safety. Several other committees have evolved to provide direction on programming issues. For example, the Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality (CMAQ) committee provides direction on the programming of federal CMAQ funds, and other committees provide priories of federal fund programming on bridges in Kansas and Missouri. A complete list of committees is included in Table 1. Table 1 Transportation Related Committees Total Transportation Policy Committee (TTPC) Transportation Legislative Advocacy Committee (TLAC) Air Quality Forum Aviation Committee Bicycle-Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC) Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality (CMAQ) Goods Movement Committee Highway Committee Long Range Transportation Plan Sub-Committee (LRTPSC) Kansas Transportation Enhancements Committee (TE) Missouri Transportation Enhancements Committee (TE) Operation Green Light Committees (OGL) Special Transportation-Job Access Partnership Kansas STP/Bridge Priorities Committee Missouri STP/Bridge Priorities Committee River Crossing Task Force Transit Committee Collaboration with partner governments at the State Level As a bi-state organization, the MPO has to work within the policy and operational framework of each state. The respondents were very careful in pointing out that Kansas and Missouri were different and both states had very pragmatic reasons for their own transportation policy frame work. Missouri is more of an urban state than Kansas; therefore, has state level policies that mesh more naturally with regional urban development. Kansas is more rural, and the Kansas City MPO at this time is the only multi-county MPO in the state. Kansas deals more naturally with counties as subjurisdictions rather than regional governments. In Missouri, the Missouri DOT relies on the MPO as a key building block in the development of the regional transportation program, but not the only building block (local governments and internal needs are also part of the program development). In Kansas, the MPO provides input to the improvement programming process but is only considered one of several points of input. The State of Missouri and the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) have done a good job of making sure that their long-rang planning objectives correspond to the long-rang planning objectives of the MPO, and the reverse is also true. For example, many of the projects identified in the MPO plan on the state system often come from MoDOT identified in a MoDOT sponsored corridor study. On the other hand, the MPO may identify needs on the state highway that MoDOT will then in turn include as an identified need, but not necessarily a priority for improvement or expansion on MoDOT’s system. Since the MPO plan represents needs identified by both local and state governments, some of the needs identified in the MPO plan for the state system many not necessarily represent MoDOT’s own priorities. Of the two state (Missouri and Kansas), MoDOT tends to have a much more long-term and programmatic process for building the state’s transportation improvement program. The state improvement program tends to roll new projects into the improvement program and follows them through until completed. Coordination with the MPO plan for MoDOT tends to be fairly mechanical. The Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) has their own independent state program that is generally tied to specific legislative initiatives. For example, Kansas is currently in a ten year legislative initiative created in 1999 called the “Comprehensive Transportation Plan” which specifically designates a few high profile projects and identifies state level funding by category and mode.(1) The 1999 plan was preceded by a an eight year plan developed in 1989. Under Kansas’s current legislative initiative, there are several categories of projects, the key ones being systems expansion projects and major modification projects. For these categories, KDOT solicits projects from stakeholders, including the Kansas City Area MPO, and these projects are then considered for potential inclusion in the statewide program. Through KDOT’s internal process, projects are selected for the KDOT’s improvement program. KDOT is currently reconsidering how local and regional government input is gathered. This initiative is called the Partnership Program. Collaboration with partner governments at the Local Level There is very little that flows down from the MPO plan to local jurisdictions. The MPOs greatest leverage over local projects is through the scoring of projects for federal funding participation in local projects. Project that are purely locally funded that have impacts across jurisdictions are generally evaluated for their impact on the entire system by the MPO but if the local government is willing to fund the project then the project will generally become part of the regional Transportation Improvement Plan. In reality, local projects are selected by local government professionals with a great deal of care regarding continuity of projects across jurisdictions. Local project selection does not currently have a real planning context for determining priorities but the regional government has common policy level direction. MPO Assets and Asset Management The Kansas City area MPO does not have any role in asset management of conventional transportation assets other than what is implied through the project selection process. Currently, through the federal funding resource allocation process, local jurisdictions must develop a description of the condition of the asset being improved or reconstructed, but there is no uniformity in these assessments. The MPO would like to have a greater role in determining whether the appropriate level of effort is being spent on maintaining assets to reach a desirable balance between maintenance and capital spending, but does not currently have the resources or the authority to support asset management of transportation assets. The first and only asset that MARC will own has evolved from the Operation Green Light program. This program involves the cooperation of about 20 jurisdictions on the improved management of the traffic control system to create greater throughput on signalized arterial streets. MARC will lead the development of traffic signal plans either in cooperation with the local jurisdiction or by themselves. Ultimately a communication system will tie each of the individual arterials traffic control systems into a signal command center where a MARC employee will manage the system and change or adjust the signal timing plans and make modifications to the signal timing plans to respond to incidents and special events. Summary The general purpose of metropolitan government is to coordinate and bridge between programs and governments; therefore, allowing silos to create misallocations of resources by the MPO or MARC would seem to be antithetical to its mission. However, activities which are outside of its policy authority may create misallocations of resources. For example, the lack of state level growth control and land use policy creates inefficiencies in development patterns and may cause public services to be more costly. However, MARC’s willingness to spearhead the Operation Green Light programs is a clear example of the regional government playing a leadership role in bridging jurisdictional silos. 1. “Graves inks transportation bill: Governor says legislation will change face of Kansas,” Topeka, Capital Journal, May 14, 1999, http://cjonline.com/stories/051499/cyb_transplan.shtml