Six-Figure Bus Shelter Stirs Cries to Stop It

By JOEL MILLMAN

PORTLAND, Ore.—A growing dust-up in a small town over the mounting cost of a few bus shelters offers a window on the arcane nature of federal appropriations.

Grants Pass, a timber and farming community south of Portland, launched the bus-shelter project in late 2008. Tapping federal funds awarded to it, the city initially budgeted $322,000 to build five shelters, or more than $60,000 per structure—a row of seats and an awning.

Since then, a welter of rules has forced the city to allocate more federal funds to the project. With a $150,000 appropriation recently tacked on, the tab comes to $530,000, or $106,000 apiece.

“It’s up to something like $940 per square foot,” said City Councilman Dan De Young, a heating and air-conditioning contractor when he isn’t participating in local governance.

The additional funds, approved by the Grants Pass City Council earlier this month, are to be reconsidered Wednesday night, followed by a vote to determine whether to go forward or to scale the project back—or perhaps even shelve it and put the funds to some other use against traffic congestion.

The main source of the shelters’ funding is gasoline-tax revenue raised from Oregon motorists and then distributed as part of an alphabet soup of federal programs supervised by state and local bureaucrats. Grants Pass (named for Ulysses S. Grant’s decisive, if distant, victory in the siege of Vicksburg, Miss.) has accumulated millions of Federal Highway Administration dollars to cut down on congestion and air pollution.

And indeed, the city of 33,225 has increased public-transit usage by 80% since 2010, says transit supervisor Scott Chancey of Josephine County’s Community Transit service, to almost 10,000 riders per month.

But to spend the money, Grants Pass must navigate a thicket of regulations. For example, because the city isn’t certified to administer federal highway dollars, it was compelled to collaborate with Oregon’s Department of Transportation. The DOT, citing its own limited staff, handed off some of those responsibilities to a private consultancy.

“That probably added $140,000 to our budget,” said Scott Lindberg, the Grants Pass official in charge of grant writing.

There were other problems. Grants Pass initially budgeted $2,500 per shelter for five pieces of local art. But that covered only the cost of each artist’s presentation, not the acquisition and installation of the pieces. The final art bill: $75,000.

Mr. Lindberg estimates that buying five shelters from the manufacturer, Landscape Forms Inc., of Kalamazoo, Mich., would cost Grants Pass just under $100,000, before installation. Construction work, the engineering reports, environmental studies and other items account for the rest of the project’s cost.

“The city determines the scope of the work,” said Patrick Cooney, communications director for the Oregon Department of Transportation. “They use state offices because we have the technical expertise to oversee certain certifications or requirements that the feds put on a project. But in no way should this drive up exponentially the cost of a project.”

Councilman de Young said of the tab, “Around here, that’s enough to build a three-bedroom house. What we should do is build a house at each station, and if you miss your last bus, you can stay there overnight.”

Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com