Milk the feds

I never understood why so many little Upstate NY cities ended up with short little highways stubs that go from nowhere to nowhere. It was mostly a scheme to milk more urban renewal grants out of the federal government, always a top priority of the Rockefeller administration who claimed New York State wasn’t getting their fair share of federal revenue.

Apparently to obtain a urban renewal grant, the state had to match 25% of the project, which could be in cash or a complementary urban renewal project. The stipulation was that project had to be in the same community as the urban renewal project, but nothing in the law prevented the matching funds from coming from another federally aidable project.

The preferred method of the state was to do the match using a federally aidable highway project which was federally reimbursed at 50% or 90% depending on whether it was an interstate system designated or just a regional priority highway. What wasn’t aidable by federal highway funds could be taken out of the always then growing gas tax. Sometimes they used local housing authorities constructing low income housing with FHA matches to do the same thing – another feature of many Upstate cities. With revenue bonds based on tenant rent and state chartered public authorities that was entirety off budget.

The moral of story is anytime you see a highway or large public housing building along with large vacant lots in an Upstate city be very suspicious of it being part of a scheme to milk the federal government’s various grant programs.