Bicycle Retailer:

The Badger State Trail, along with 91 other bicycle/pedestrian projects in communities throughout Wisconsin will go unfunded by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) over the next two years.

At a press conference yesterday at the site of the Badger State Trail at County Highway PD, the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin explained that much of the funding shortfall is because the state only spends about 30 percent of the funds that the federal government designates for Transportation Enhancements. The state could choose to spend over $30 million every two years on these projects, but instead recently only provided $9.8 million for the same period. The WisDOT instead uses the funding for other projects like highways. In recent years, the WisDOT has worked to add some token amounts back to the Transportation Enhancement program through a program called Surface Transportation Program-Discretionary (STP-D), but those efforts were eliminated by the Joint Finance Committee in the state budget process.

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