With the Senate’s recent passage of a bipartisan $1 Trillion infrastructure package, the largest investment in infrastructure in over a decade, becoming one step closer to reality for transportation and transit agencies across the country, is your agency ready? While the final tallies of additional funding won’t be known for several more weeks until the House takes action, preliminary analysis of the Senate bill has shown a significant boost for transit agencies and other modes that help offset climate change.
TransPro’s third value is “I am proactive to the needs of my client, anticipate their unexpressed needs and identify topics where I could bring additional value.” This value is particularly important in times of uncertainty around future funding levels such as this year. Does your agency have a plan for how you might spend these additional resources? For many years’ transportation agencies, including transit agencies have often fell back on statements like; “we don’t have the funding to provide those service levels” or “we don’t have funding to provide service to that request”. With an influx of federal funding, statements like “we can’t afford to do that” will become more difficult to make to local stakeholders and advocates of expanded service. In response, the pressures of addressing the loudest squeaky wheels with this additional revenue is tempting; but is this the highest and best use of these new revenues for serving the people of your community?
This is where having a strategic plan that clearly articulates what success looks for your community can be a powerful tool to respond to these calls to spend new revenue on unexpressed needs or one-time expenditures that are not in alignment with your core mission. The key component of TransPro’s strategic planning process is identifying what success looks like early in the process and then intentionally defining transformational outcomes that produce measurable results. With desired results clearly identified, transit agencies can build a structure and systems aligned with the clearly articulated and adopted organizational mission and vision that support the defined success outcomes. Better yet, agencies can measure and report out how these new revenues are supporting the mission of the organization.
Getting buy in on a strategic plan requires collaboration with many stakeholders and takes time to do right. Does your agency have aligned success measures? Is your agency ready to accept an influx of additional Federal funding? Are you prepared to tell your story of how this new revenue is helping you achieve success? If not, it’s not too late to start the planning process.
