By Andrew Knochel | Cronkite News Service
Cities can’t wait for new federal funding and updated policies needed to advance transportation projects, Mayor Greg Stanton told officials from around the country Monday.
“Times have changed,” Stanton said in a speech to National Association of City Transportation Officials’ Designing Cities conference here. “The old relationship between cities and the federal government has broken down.”
Stanton pointed to the northbound expansion of Metro light rail and Arizona State University’s Downtown Phoenix Campus as city projects that were funded with no federal money.
“We can’t rely on the federal government,” he said. “If we want to advance our city, we have to be more self-reliant. We can’t design a big project and then go to Washington and hope they’ll pick up 80 percent of the tab like maybe we did in the past.”
