Officials from the Kentucky and Indiana division offices of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the Region 4 Office of the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), and the Region 4 and 5 Offices of the Environmental Protection Agency have found that the Kentuckiana Regional Planning and Development Agency’s (KIPDA) 2011-2015 Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) and the Horizon 2030 Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP) both meet the federal conformity guidelines.
The MTP provides a comprehensive vision for the transportation infrastructure over the upcoming 20 years for KIPDA’s five-counties and its policy committee. Transportation projects seeking federal funding must be included in the MTP.
The TIP is a short-range funding document for the five-county KIPDA area. Projects advance from the MTP to the TIP when they are ready for funding.
The updated documents, which were approved by the KIPDA Transportation Policy Committee on October 8, 2010, are the short-range and long-range transportation planning documents for Bullitt, Jefferson and Oldham counties in Kentucky and Clark and Floyd counties in Indiana. The policy committee is made up of elected and appointed officials from the five-counties.
The TIP is a four-year planning and funding document and the MTP is a 20-year planning document.
The federal agencies found that KIPDA’s documents met the five criteria of the Transportation Conformity Rule, which includes: use of the latest planning assumptions, use of the latest emission model, use of appropriate consultation procedures, consistency with the mobile source emission budgets in the State Implementation Plan (SIP), and provisions for the timely implementation of the transportation control measures in the SIP.
Both the MTP and the TIP went into a lapse in December of 2009, which essentially prevented projects from being added to or deleted from the documents. The current MTP was set to expire December 8, 2010, and this approval of both documents allows the expenditure of Federal transportation funding to continue in the region without interruption.
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