SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:

Federal public transportation law (49 U.S.C. 5339(b)) authorizes FTA to make competitive grants for buses and bus facilities. Federal public law (49 U.S.C. 5338(a)(2)(M)) authorized $289,044,179 in FY 2021 funds for the Grants for Buses and Bus Facilities Program. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, appropriated an additional $125,000,000 for the Grants for Buses and Bus Facilities Program. After the oversight takedown of $4,455,331, FTA is announcing the availability of $409,588,848 for the Grants for Buses and Bus Facilities Program.

On September 20, 2021, FTA published a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) (86 FR 52291) announcing the availability of $409,588,848 in competitive funding under the Buses and Bus Facilities Program. These funds will provide financial assistance to states and eligible public agencies to replace, rehabilitate, purchase, or lease buses, vans, and related equipment, and for capital projects to rehabilitate, purchase, construct, or lease bus-related facilities. In response to the NOFO, FTA received 303 eligible project proposals totaling approximately $2.56 billion in Federal funds. Project proposals were evaluated based on each applicant's responsiveness to the program evaluation criteria outlined in the NOFO.

Based on the criteria in the NOFO, FTA is funding 70 projects, as shown in Table 1, for a total of $409,274,220. Recipients selected for competitive funding are required to work with their FTA Regional Office to submit a grant application in FTA's Transit Award Management System (TrAMS) for the projects identified in the attached table to quickly obligate funds. Grant applications must only include eligible activities applied for in the original project application. Funds must be used consistent with the competitive proposal and for the eligible capital purposes described in the NOFO.

In cases where the allocation amount is less than the proposer's total requested amount, recipients are required to fund the scalable project option as described in the application. If the award amount does not correspond to the scalable option, the recipient should work with the Regional Office to reduce scope or scale the project such that a complete phase or project is accomplished. Recipients may also provide additional local funds to complete a proposed project. A discretionary project identification number has been assigned to each project for tracking purposes and must be used in the TrAMS application.

Selected projects are eligible to incur costs under pre-award authority no earlier than the date projects were publicly announced. Pre-award authority does not guarantee that project expenses incurred prior to the award of a grant will be eligible for reimbursement, as eligibility for reimbursement is contingent upon other requirements, such as planning and environmental requirements, having been met. For more about FTA's policy on pre-award authority, please see the current FTA Apportionments, Allocations, and Program Information and Interim Guidance at https://www.transit.dot.gov/​funding/​apportionments. Post-award reporting requirements include submission of Federal Financial Reports and Milestone Progress Reports in TrAMS (see FTA Circular 5010.1E). Recipients must comply with all applicable Federal statutes, regulations, executive orders, FTA circulars, and other Federal requirements in carrying out the project supported by the FTA grant. FTA emphasizes that recipients must follow all third-party procurement requirements set forth in Federal public ( printed page 15490) transportation law (49 U.S.C. 5325(a)) and described in the FTA Third Party Contracting Guidance Circular (FTA Circular 4220.1). Funds allocated in this announcement must be obligated in a grant by September 30, 2025.

Technical Review and Evaluation Summary: The FTA assessed all project proposals that were submitted under the FY 2021 Buses and Bus Facilities Program competition according to the following evaluation criteria. The specific metrics for each criterion were described in the September 20, 2021, NOFO:

1. Demonstration of Need

2. Demonstration of Benefits

3. Planning/Local Prioritization

4. Local Financial Commitment

5. Project Implementation Strategy

6. Technical, Legal, and Financial Capacity

For each project, a technical review panel assigned a rating of Highly Recommended, Recommended, or Not Recommended for each of the six criteria. The technical review panel then assigned an overall rating of Highly Recommended, Recommended, Not Recommended, or Ineligible to the project proposal.

Projects were assigned a final overall rating of Highly Recommended if they were rated Highly Recommended in at least four categories overall, with no Not Recommended ratings. Projects were assigned a final overall rating of Recommended if the projects had three or more Recommended ratings and no Not Recommended ratings. Projects were assigned a rating of Not Recommended if they received a Not Recommended rating in any criteria. A summary of the final overall ratings for all 303 eligible project proposals is shown in the table below.

As outlined in the NOFO, FTA made the final selections based on the technical ratings as well as geographic diversity, diversity in the size of transit systems receiving funding, Administration priorities including climate change, and/or receipt of other recent competitive awards.

As further outlined in the NOFO, in some cases, due to funding limitations, proposers that were selected for funding received less than the amount originally requested.

87 FR 15489