Philadelphia’s RAISE Grant Applications - North Philly School Zones and Eakins Oval
Earlier this summer, the City of Philadelphia was awarded a $25 million RAISE grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to make safety improvements in North Philadelphia school zones. This is great! According to the CBS report,“[t]he funding for the traffic safety project in North Philadelphia will make safety improvements around six schools and high-injury corridors by installing high-visibility crosswalks, raising crosswalks and redesigning road signage and traffic signals for better visibility.” All that money and it’s just going to six schools? Why is this so expensive?
I submitted a Right-to-Know Law request for the City’s RAISE Grant applications in 2022 and 2023 to find out more. It turns out that both years, the City submitted two applications: one for the school zones, and one for Eakins Oval. The full applications from 2023 are posted at the end of this blog.
Eakins Oval Application
The City requested $23,750,000 for “multimodal safety, accessibility, and mobility improvements at the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.” The proposed statement of work says they want to remove the road between the Oval and the Rocky Steps! This would make it much safer for everyone to walk to the PMA or get from Fairmount to the Schuylkill Trail on foot/bike and sounds like a great plan. So obviously they didn’t get any grant money for it.
The “milestones” are different groups thinking about plans, not actually doing anything to make the Oval/Parkway safer.
The City listed “public involvement and awareness” in its “assessment of project risks and mitigation strategies” section, alongside actual normal risks like “procurement or scheduling delays” and “maintenance of traffic/construction detours.” Wow.
North Philadelphia Schools
The North Philadelphia Schools grant application sought $25 million “to construct multimodal safety, accessibility, and mobility improvements, or "Slow Zones," around six schools and High Injury Network (HIN) corridors in Philadelphia, PA.” This is an awesome goal and I’m really happy they won this grant. I’m just curious why $25 million isn’t expected to go farther.
This proposed budget (for the $25 million grant and $4 million from the city) is probably full of made up numbers.
A note about the redactions
The City made redactions to both applications, stating, “records have been redacted to the extent the records pertain to agency procurement or disposal of supplies, services or construction prior to the award of the contract or prior to the opening and rejection of all bids. See 65 P.S. § 67.708(b)(26).” Section 708(b)(26) of the RTKL actually exempts from disclosure “[a] proposal pertaining to agency procurement or disposal of supplies, services or construction prior to the award of the contract or prior to the opening and rejection of all bids; financial information of a bidder or offeror requested in an invitation for bid or request for proposals to demonstrate the bidder's or offeror's economic capability; or the identity of members, notes and other records of agency proposal evaluation committees established under 62 Pa.C.S. § 513 (relating to competitive sealed proposals).” That does not apply to an agency’s grant application for federal funding. And even if it somehow did, 708(b)(26) only applies “prior to the award of the contract or prior to the opening and rejection of all bids” - the grant has been awarded, so the application would be disclosable now. I filed an OOR appeal because they’re wrong and it’s just so frustrating to have the city make a bad faith argument to avoid their transparency requirements. But I figured I would go ahead with this blog post now anyways because the rest of the grant application content is interesting.
The Eakins Oval Application:
The North Philly Schools Application: