Comprehensive integration of land use and transportation planning requires a rationale, predictable, and transparent system for designing and selecting projects.  Accomplishing such a system requires elimination of earmarks that fund transportation projects through legislative appropriations.  As an interim step, improved transparency in the state legislature’s earmarking process would reduce unanticipated and costly changes and delays.

The ability to accurately plan for and implement transportation improvements is affected by unexpected projects that are funded through earmarks, outside of established planning mechanisms.  It is understandable why legislators, on both the state and Congressional level, like earmarking, especially when dollars are scarce and the transportation programming system can seem opaque.  Nonetheless, earmarking has few real benefits.  On the state level, bond bills are filled with earmarks – but it is the Governor who actually decides how to spend bond money, leaving proponents and municipalities with a feeling of having been tricked or misled.

Transportation investments cannot serve a smart growth agenda if they adopted principally through legislative deal-making.  Rather, the legislative branches of government should appropriate money and establish priorities and broad guidelines for choosing projects.  Then, they should stand aside and let the executive branch of the Commonwealth along with the MPO decide which projects best serve the region’s land use, mobility, equity, and economic goals,

The country and the Commonwealth need rationale, predictable, and transparent systems for selecting transportation projects – and earmarking should not be a substitute for that system.  Until all legislators agree to renounce earmarks, it is difficult – perhaps even imprudent – for a single state or an individual legislator to back away from the earmarking system.  In the long run, the region and the nation would best be served by the elimination of both state and federal earmarks.  

As an interim and supporting step, the state can bring more transparency to the earmark process by establishing reporting requirements for earmarks, including itemized lists of projects, sponsors, costs, purpose, and benefits.  

7.a    The Legislature should adopt an earmark reporting system

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