North Carolina to create 300K jobs with highways

Armed with a new formula for job creation, the North Carolina Department of Transportation says it can create up to 300,000 news jobs.

The new formula is called the Strategic Mobility Formula, and it is projected to create the jobs through 478 highway projects, which translates to a 273 percent increase in projects and a 172 percent increase in jobs.

The NCDOT released a draft of its State Transportation Improvement Program in December, which proposed projects to pay for in the state between 2015 and 2025. It is the final step in implementing the Strategic Transportation Investments law, which outlines the new formula.

Ed Lewis, division 7 planning engineer, said the program will fund some projects in Orange County, such as a new rail station in Hillsborough and a light rail system in Chapel Hill, which will have a station near UNC Hospitals.

At Monday’s NCDOT open house in Hillsborough, Lewis said residents expressed the most interest in the new rail station in Hillsborough.

“We had six or seven folks who were concerned with how the project would develop the area,” he said. “There is an area planned to develop around the train station, but planning hasn’t gone too far along because these are all new projects.”

Lewis said this program is not only about new projects, but it is also about the creation of more jobs.

“When you come in and build these projects, they create immediate jobs,” he said. “These projects are going to give us the infrastructure for development and job creation.”

Mike Stanley, the program’s central region manager, said the old formula allocated funds depending on the population of the region and the amount of unfinished projects. The remaining 25 percent of funds were then equally distributed among the regions.

Stanley said the old formula based funding off of what projects were needed, whereas the new formula has made allocation a more quantitative process.

Stanley said the new formula defines three categories for project funding — state, regional and division.

The funding for each project is dependent on which category the project fits into — 30 percent of funding goes to state, 30 percent to regional and 40 percent to division.

“The allocation process uses a different basis — it’s a data driven process,” Stanley said. “Instead of using population and equal share, the formula now bases allocation on categories.”

Mike Mills, division 7 engineer, said the new formula takes the judgment out of funding allocation.

“We’re not sitting down and asking, ‘What needs to be built here?’” he said. “It’s more data driven, which is important because money is tight.”

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