On a cool, spring morning in Galt, a small community south of Sacramento, City Engineer Trung Trinh waited to cross a busy intersection.
“Wait to cross C Street at Lincoln Way,” the signal blared.
This stretch of road right off Highway 99 is usually people’s first view of Galt. Trinh says a year ago, it was all pavement. But now it has new, plant-filled medians along bike lanes and crosswalks — all part of a big upgrade to the road.
“It's better looking and it promotes people walking and biking,” he said. “Your bike lane is now fully protected, so you can go through here and you're not you're not afraid of cars just swiping by. You're protected by a buffer.”
Trinh also pointed out that the road is flat now — it used to come up about six inches.
“They'd have a hard time rolling a wheelchair up when you cross the road and when you come out of this driveway — Denny's — cars would bottom out,” he said as he motioned to the restaurant.
The engineer said construction just ended, so the city doesn’t have data on how much safer the road is, but he’s seeing cars slow down and bike traffic go up.
He also said the city has wanted to move on this project since before he started working in Galt about two decades ago, but it didn’t have the means to do it. It got help from one of several big injections of federal money for projects like this from the Biden administration.
But now, California’s budget is on the brink of a big transition — the federal government has sent the state large pots of money over the last few years under the Biden administration to fix roads, support public health and keep small businesses going.
Those programs are coming to a natural end, just as the Trump administration is making huge cuts to states.
Most of the Biden-era money is already out the door, but the federal government is still allocating the last of it, and even pulling some of that back. At the same time — the Trump administration is making big cuts across government and signaling that it won’t take the same generous approach.
Over Biden’s four years in office, he signed off on trillions of dollars in federal funding for state and local governments.
“This is a truly — centuries long — one of those larger moments of investment,” said Adie Tomer, a Brookings Institution Senior Fellow. He added the infrastructure investments alone in these bills are bigger than President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, but not quite what the country spent on roads and transportation in the 1970s.
These packages include all kinds of acronyms that have been in the news over the last few years like IIJA -– the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — IRA — the Inflation Reduction Act — or ARPA — the American Rescue Plan Act.
They generally required projects to be shovel-ready, which meant that a lot of them had been in the making, and often stalled, for decades already.
“Federal money increases their investment and projects that have been waiting for more money now all of a sudden got to move a little bit faster,” Tomer added.
This money put broadband into rural parts of the state, expanded public transportation, like the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and helped open more shelters, like Joshua’s House in Sacramento for terminally ill patients experiencing homelessness.
Tomer said that’s been great for state budgets, like California’s.
“When the federal government sends more money down to states and localities, they quite literally have bigger capital budgets,” he explained.
Most of those funds have already gone out, but some are still in the pipeline, or even being delayed by the federal government.
James Corless, heads the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, the region’s planning agency. He said recent federal funding has been a huge boon to health and transportation improvements.
“But those grants — the last six months really, dozens of them — are really sort of in a holding pattern,” he said.
Corless said that now, even the uncertainty of what’s ahead is slowing down work.
Los Angeles Democratic Assembly member Jesse Gabriel heads the budget committee and said federal support shouldn’t be unique to a moment in time.
“These programs are not charity,” he said. “This is taxpayer dollars, dollars that folks here in the state of California paid in federal taxes that have come back to our state.”
Gabriel added there is a lot in flux at the federal level, and that’s making it tough for state lawmakers to plan for the year ahead as they create a budget — due next month.
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