Commissioner Murman mentioned in this Tampa Tribune article on MacDill ferry project:
TRANSPORTATION
Environmental study to delay proposed MacDill ferry project
By Yvette C. Hammett | Tribune Staff
Published: November 2, 2015 | Updated: November 3, 2015 at 07:19 AM
TAMPA — The much touted high-speed ferry project designed to transport MacDill Air Force Base employees to their jobs more quickly and unclog congested roadways has collided with a bureaucratic obstacle threatening to delay it by one to three years.
It will likely take close to two years to complete a federally mandated environmental study to determine the best location for a ferry terminal on Tampa Bay. That will almost certainly push back the announced 2017 start date for construction.
Though only a fraction of the project involves federal funds — $4.7 million from the Federal Transit Administration — the federal agency now controls the timeline for the project, Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority CFO Jeff Seward told his board Monday.
The remainder of funds will be paid by Hillsborough County, the state and by private partners. It is expected to cost a minimum of $17 million just for infrastructure and vessels.
Tampa attorney Ed Turanchik, who represents the two companies partnering with Hillsborough County for the project, said he was both surprised and frustrated by Seward’s report. This is one of the reasons he and his partners — HMS Ferries and South Swell Development — didn’t encourage seeking federal money for the project, he said.
“We were afraid of this,” Turanchik said. “It’s great the FTA is excited about the project, but we wanted to get it going as soon as possible. There’s a lot of excitement in the community about it.”
Anyone who deals with the federal government should have seen this coming, Seward said. “I would argue that it’s only a setback for those that didn’t anticipate the requirements that come with federal dollars.”
The project plan calls for running high-speed ferries between some yet-to-be determined docking point in Gibsonton and MacDill Air Force Base. The ferries are expected to alleviate not only the gridlock that occurs each morning at the base’s front gates, but also the congestion on overcrowded county highways by taking thousands of cars out of the mix each work day.
“It’s fairly frustrating,” Turanchik said. “Commissioner (Sandy) Murman expressed some concerns about the fact that the federal government is a minor partner in this, but has taken control of the whole process. That’s the problem with federalizing these things.”
He said the federal government “talks out of both sides of its mouth. They say they want to encourage public-private partnership, but on the other hand they push everything through these bureaucratic channels.”
Spread over 15 years, the federal funding — only half of what HART sought — only accounts for about $200,000 a year, but a huge delay, Turanchik said. “It should not take this long.”
Turanchik said he also is working with the county on a pilot project that would have ferries running between downtown Tampa and downtown St. Petersburg within a year. There is no federal money involved in that project. But for this commuter project, federal bureaucracy is weighing it down, , he said. “It’s tedious. It’s probably going to drive the cost up, perhaps more than the value of the federal dollars.”
Still, it would be hard to walk away from the federal money, Hillsborough County Public Works Director Mike Williams said.
“I think it would be very difficult to walk away from nearly $5 million, particularly since we don’t have an overflow of money in our transportation CIP (Capital Improvement Program) right now. I think it’s going to take a little bit longer than I thought, but I’m not surprised,” Williams said. “We all want to get something going quickly.”
It was the county’s private partners that came up with the timeline for the project, which also included selection of a site by this year, something that also clearly won’t happen, Seward said. Before a site can be selected, he said, the FTA will likely want to see the analysis based on the National Environmental Policy Act.
“Acceptance of federal dollars should have come with the knowledge there was going to be an additional layer of restrictions required,” Seward said. “No one should be surprised.”
Another glitch involves the contract to hire a firm to do the NEPA analysis, Seward told the HART board. A county civil contract the transit agency had planned to use doesn’t contain all the federal requirements, so a special bid package will have to be put together for the NEPA analysis.
