Workshops to determine guidelines for Cycle 5 of the Active Transportation continue, with input coming in from around the state. The schedule of workshops, as well as downloadable materials, is available on the CTC's ATP website under the 2021 ATP Cycle 5 header.
Two of the issues we have been tracking most closely are those concerning regional definitions for Disadvantaged Community (DAC) status, and leveraging points in the Medium Infrastructure application. At the time of writing, CTC staff plans to recommend approaches to those questions that partially, but not fully, meet our recommendations.\
First, on the matter of DACs, we believe that regional definitions should be removed, because using consistent statewide metrics ensures transparency and allows applications to be evaluated on a comparable scale. Instead, the option to use a regional DAC definition has been moved to reside under “other” in the DAC question, where it will be listed as an option along with the Healthy Places Index, which is a tool we support as a statewide DAC metric. Applicants who use the “other” option will sacrifice DAC severity points. We are encouraged by the inclusion of HPI and hope that in future cycles, it will be available for use as a metric with full severity points.
Second, we have advocated expanding the current 2-person structure for evaluating applications to teams of 3 and improving consistency and transparency of the evaluation process. CTC will adopt our strong recommendation that all teams be required to include detailed comments explaining their score for each question. While the evaluation teams will remain at 2 people, the team will be required to have a conference call with CTC staff to go over their scores. We are cautiously optimistic that these two changes will help address perceptions that the ATP evaluation process is opaque.
