Learn more about regional updates in Southeastern Massachusetts! https://conta.cc/4aAjFjl

Learn more about the agency’s accomplishments over the past year via by clicking on the image below!
View the printer friendly version here.

As has long been the tradition, for presentation at the SRPEDD Annual Meeting the fourth Wednesday of September. Southeastern Regional Planning and Economic Development District (SRPEDD) Commission has recognized individuals and organizations from across Southeastern Massachusetts that have made a difference in advancing the agency and region, and once again, solicits your assistance in identifying this year’s awardees.

Click here for the 2025 SRPEDD Annual Special Recognition and Commission Awards Requests for Nominations form.

SRPEDD Announces a 21‐day Public Comment Period and a Remote Public Meeting to hear comments on the SMMPO region’s list of transportation resilience projects to include in the Massachusetts Statewide Resilience Improvement Plan (RIP) and qualification for additional funding.

December 20, 2024 – Southeastern Massachusetts Metropolitan Planning Organization (SMMPO) staff recently concluded Phase 1 of a regional evacuation route mapping study that collected information from 27 Southeastern Massachusetts communities about local vulnerabilities, hazards, and existing evacuation protocols and resources relating to flooding, winter storms, wildfires, hazardous materials, and active threat events. The study will culminate in a Regional Evacuation Plan that will map regionally coordinated evacuation routes, document shared best practices and resources for the 27 communities, and recommend action steps to improve communication and egress in the event of an emergency. Phase 1 of the Evacuation Route Study identified various vulnerable locations, many of which are susceptible to flooding. SMMPO staff are seeking to include these 146 locations and potential projects in the MassDOT Resilience Improvement Plan (RIP) to qualify them for additional funding.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has released a round of Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation Program (PROTECT) grants. The purpose of this grant program is to support projects that improve the resilience of transportation infrastructure to withstand natural disasters and impacts of climate change, flooding, sea level rise, and extreme weather, and other natural disasters. The funding offers both planning and implementation grants to state, local and regional government bodies to focus on making roads, bridges, and transit systems more climate resistant. Grants can range from $100,000 to $5 million for planning projects and $5 million to $25,000,000 for implementation projects. Recipients are required to fund 20% of project costs, while FHWA funds 80%. However, including the project in a statewide resilience improvement plan reduces the local match requirement to 13% and eliminates the requirement to conduct an elaborate benefit-cost analysis. SMMPO staff are aiming to include 146 potential projects in the MassDOT statewide Resilience Improvement Plan to make this funding more accessible to local communities should they wish to apply before the February 24, 2025 deadline.

This list was prepared using locations identified in the regional Evacuation Route Study, Regional Transportation Plan, a GIS vulnerability analysis, and review of communities’ Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Plans. It is being released to local officials and public review in order to gather feedback regarding if listed locations are appropriate and whether any are missing. Following the public comment period, locations will be voted on for approval by the SMMPO and later evaluated by MassDOT for final inclusion in the statewide RIP. SMMPO staff are available to assist with grant applications and encourage municipal officials to notify the agency if they plan to apply.

The SMMPO decides how to allocate about $26 million in federal funding for the region, which supplements state and local transportation infrastructure investments in Southeastern Massachusetts. The SMMPO conducts the federally required metropolitan transportation planning process for 27 Southeastern Massachusetts communities and is one of Massachusetts’ thirteen Metropolitan Planning Organizations.

A public meeting to hear comments on the SMMPO’s resilience projects list will be held remotely on Wednesday January 15, 2025 at 4:00 PM via Zoom. Everyone is welcome to attend, ask questions and offer feedback. This link https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/categories/200101697 provides the information to allow participants to connect to the meeting through a computer, smart phone or regular telephone. To register for the meeting visit: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BKM4QXHwQD-Z-lJ7SChHhw

The list will become final on January 21, 2025, at the next SMMPO meeting. The draft list can be found on SRPEDD’s website at https://srpedd.org/transportation/srpedd-evacuation-route-plan/ for review. Link here: DRAFT SMMPO Transportation Resilience Projects List.

Comments and questions are encouraged and, if attendance at the above‐mentioned public meeting is not possible, may be offered by a variety of methods by January 20, 2025 including:

Email Jackie Jones at jjones@srpedd.org or call 508-824-1367 x230;
Direct message or comment on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/SRPEDD; or
Direct message or Tweet to Twitter @SRPEDD_NEWS https://twitter.com/SRPEDD_NEWS?lang=en

The SMMPO, through SRPEDD, provides reasonable accommodations, including language assistance and/or auxiliary aids and services free of charge, upon request and as available. For accommodation or language assistance, please contact SRPEDD’s Title VI Coordinator by phone (508 824-1367), dial 711 to use MassRelay, or by email at aduarte@srpedd.org. Requests should be made as soon as possible prior to the meeting.

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The Southeastern Regional Planning and Economic Development District (SRPEDD) will be hosting a Holiday Networking Event and Open House to present a final draft update of the region’s Priority Development Areas (PDAs) and Priority Preservation Areas (PPAs) at Cork and Wine Tapas in New Bedford on Thursday, December 19, 2024, from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM. The event will also be the quarterly meeting of the Regional Economic Strategy Committee (RESC). Please join us to review and comment on this work! Those interested in attending can register here.

Background from 2008 and 2013

Working with communities to plan for potential growth and the arrival of South Coast Rail (SCR) passenger service has remained a long-standing priority for MBTA and SRPEDD.

In 2008, SRPEDD, along with other Regional Planning Agencies (RPAs), partnered with individual municipalities and the Commonwealth to develop a comprehensive regional land use strategy for the region. Designating PDAs and PPAs allowed communities to identify local areas that were appropriate for growth as well as areas necessary to preserve for ecological, cultural, or recreational purposes. This planning process ensured that community voices and priorities were represented in local, regional, and statewide decision-making.

Five years later, in 2013, SRPEDD and sister RPAs worked to revisit and refine these original PDA and PPA designations by conducting over 100 meetings and working sessions and deploying significant Geographic Information System (GIS) data and policy analysis. This “Five-Year update” resulted in the 2013 Community Priority Areas of Regional Significance report.

2023/2024 Update

Over the past year and a half (a decade after the last update), SRPEDD staff have once again collaborated with municipal and community leaders in all 27 of the agency’s service communities in another series of presentations, working sessions, and policy and report reviews. Throughout this engagement process, cities and towns designated new PDAs and PPAs and otherwise refined and updated their existing designations to align with current community goals.

Equipped with this local knowledge, SRPEDD staff also reviewed the community PDAs and PPAs using a Regional Screening process that measured the suitability of each of the local designations for future development and preservation activities. Through this methodology, SRPEDD identified areas of regional significance from among the city and town PDAs and PPAs. Examples of these 2024 Community Priority Areas of Regional Significance can be found in the case studies outlined in the project’s interactive Story Map.

This project was by funded by the MBTA and the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities’ (EOHLC) District Local Technical Assistance (DLTA) program.

Resources

• PDA/PPA Project Page (www.srpedd.org/Priority-Areas)
• 2024 PDA/PPA Story Map

Learn more about the current engagement process through our project newsletters!

• October Updates
• July Updates
• April Welcome

Learn more about the agency’s accomplishments over the past year via by clicking on the image below! View the printer friendly version here.

Thank you to all who have participated in the Middleborough Master Plan so far! Visit the links below to check out a recap of our Kick-Off workshop and survey responses.

• Kick-Off Feedback Summary
• July Newsletter Article
• Newmasket Article Recap

Upcoming Engagement Opportunities

Participate as we work to outline and develop our first two Master Plan ‘Elements’ (or Chapters) – Open Space and Recreation and Natural and Cultural Resources!

Join us on July 21st at Soule Homestead Education Center to learn about how Middleborough’s parks, habitats, sustainability practices, and cultural, historic and natural preservation and help us create a guide and envision how these elements might looks like in the next ten years! We will also be celebrating National Ice Cream Day with free ice cream for event attendees and activities for kids.

Learn more about regional updates in Southeastern Massachusetts! https://conta.cc/45feJxc

May 23, 2024 – The FFY2024-2028 Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) for Southeastern Massachusetts currently has a surplus of 18 million dollars in federal highway regional target funds that is not being programmed in Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2024 because no major transportation projects have design plans ready in order to be advertised for construction this year. The Southeastern Massachusetts Metropolitan Planning Organization (SMMPO) is proposing to use these funds to advance a transit project that will replace 740 existing Southeastern Regional Transit Authority (SRTA) bus stop signs with modern signs that include a decal with the bus route and QR Code specific to each route, informing customers of real time location of buses. The project will provide riders with real time information about bus locations and arrivals that will help them better plan their trips and make more informed commute choices, with the overall goal of improving the reliability and accessibility of taking the bus.

This project was previously programmed for funding in FFY2025 of the FFY2025-2029 TIP but the SMMPO and regional stakeholders are pushing to advance it one year and transfer the region’s surplus of federal highway funds to federal transit funding in order to begin the project sooner. The FFY2024-2028 TIP is being amended to program $400,000 in Surface Transportation Block Grant (STBG) funds in FFY2024 and an additional $100,000 match in RTA CAP funds in FFY2025.

SRTA serves 10 communities in Southeastern Massachusetts, including Acushnet, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Fall River, Freetown, Mattapoisett, New Bedford, Somerset, Swansea, and Westport. The TIP is the programming document listing all federally funded road and bridge projects in the region and all transit projects for both the Greater Attleboro and Taunton Regional Transit Authority (GATRA) and the Southeastern Regional Transit Authority (SRTA) over five years. Each year, the SMMPO decides how to allocate about $26 million in federal funding for the region, which supplements state and local transportation infrastructure investments in Southeastern Massachusetts. The SMMPO conducts the federally required metropolitan transportation planning process for 27 Southeastern Massachusetts communities and is one of Massachusetts’ thirteen Metropolitan Planning Organizations.

Additionally, the SMMPO’s draft FFY2025 Unified Planning Work Program (UPWP) is being released to a 21-day public comment period.

The UPWP is the planning document listing the transportation-related projects, technical assistance, and other activities that SMMPO staff at the Southeastern Regional Planning and Economic Development District (SRPEDD) will undertake during the upcoming federal fiscal year to support the goals and actions established in the Regional Transportation Plan, Moving Forward 2050. Ongoing planning activities include traffic data collection and analysis, pavement management analysis, community technical assistance, transit and active transportation project planning, public engagement, and development of the TIP. New projects outlined in the draft UPWP to be undertaken in the October 1, 2024 through September 30, 2025 period include:

phase 2 of the regional evacuation route study which will utilize communities’ emergency evacuation data collected in Phase 1 to develop a regionally coordinated plan that identifies gaps, conflict points, and other needs of the region;
a healthy food access plan that will collect and map data on grocery stores, bodegas, food pantries, farmers markets, and other food security infrastructure locations to assess gaps in transit and active transportation access to food;
update of the region’s freight plan;
energy transition planning to expand public knowledge of electric vehicles and related infrastructure and funding opportunities; and
a parking lot utilization assessment that will collect and map parking usage rate data to help communities make informed, sustainable, and cost-effective parking policies and land use decisions that reduce underutilized parking spaces, incentivize fruitful land redevelopment, improve transportation access, and contribute to positive environmental impacts.
All of this work helps support the region’s 27 communities toward building a safer, and more equitable, connected, reliable, and resilient transportation system for all mode users.

A virtual public meeting on the proposed amendment and draft UPWP will be held on Tuesday, June 11, 2024, at 4:00 pm. Everyone is welcome to attend, ask questions and offer comments, but attendance is not necessary to offer input or comment. More options to offer comments can be found below.

The meeting will be conducted through the ZOOM app. This link provides the information to allow participants to connect to the meeting through a computer, smart phone or regular telephone: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/categories/200101697.

The direct link to the public meeting is:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89463267976?pwd=WXlHMmVVVGY2NFZwYVdHY3RhSUNmZz09

The draft FFY2025 UPWP and FFY24-28 TIP Amendment #7 will have a 21-day public comment period and will be endorsed at the next SMMPO meeting which is scheduled for June 18th. To read the Draft FFY2025 UPWP, visit SRPEDD’s website www.srpedd.org at the following link: Draft FFY2025 UPWP.

Comments are encouraged and may be offered by a variety of methods including: via e-mail at lestrela@srpedd.org; our website at https://srpedd.org/contact-us/; our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/SRPEDD/; or Twitter @SRPEDD_NEWS at https:// https://x.com/SRPEDD_NEWS.