Reality Check is a Bee series holding officials and organizations accountable and shining a light on their decisions. Have a tip? Email realitycheck@sacbee.com .
Documents shed light on how a Caltrans freeway-widening project lost a $100 million competitive grant and then won the same grant a year later without material changes to the project — or competing against other applicants.
Caltrans District 3 lost to 26 other freight-oriented projects when the California Transportation Commission reviewed its staff’s recommendations in June 2023. The next year, District 3 submitted another application for the same Interstate 80 widening project outside the normal competitive grant process.
The 2024 bid was approved for funding in May.
In response to a California Public Records Act request, the commission — which awards the Trade Corridor Enhancement Program grants — released the 2022 application documents, as well as the 2024 application.
The project itself had not fundamentally changed — Caltrans still said it would cost $200 million to add one new managed lane in each direction for about 8½ miles on I-80 between Davis and Sacramento. But The Sacramento Bee found three substantial differences in what Caltrans District 3 said about the project in each application.
Caltrans said in 2022 that the I-80 project was its least significant: “Priority 24 of 24.” In 2024, the state agency called the grant request “a top priority.”
2022 Trade Corridor Enhancement Program (TCEP) grant application
In the 2022 grant application, Caltrans said that it had acquired funding for an ostensibly separate pavement rehabilitation project in order to “assist the development” of the widening project. The pavement rehab that subsequently became the subject of a 2023 whistleblower complaint first reported by Politico was omitted from the 2024 application.
The 2024 application also invoked a sense of urgency not present in the 2022 application. The grant proposal dated March 24 warned that if the California Transportation Commission did not award the $105 million, then Caltrans would likely forfeit the $85.9 million it had won from the federal government. That federal money would have expired Monday — Sept. 30.
A letter of support included in the application in 2024 said, “This (Trade Corridor Enhancement Program) award is critical to successfully delivering the $86 million in discretionary federal ( Infrastructure for Rebuilding America project ) funds awarded to the project.”
After the commission considered these changes — as well as broader stylistic changes in how much the document emphasized freight — its members changed course in May and unanimously voted to give the funds to District 3 to widen I-80 from Davis, across the Yolo Causeway, to the split with Highway 50.
2024 Trade Corridor Enhancement Program (TCEP) grant application
A freeway pavement project intended to widen I-80
Experts and the Caltrans whistleblower said the freeway-widening Yolo 80 Corridor Improvements Project was futile. Decades of research shows that adding lanes to a freeway temporarily relieves congestion, but ultimately leads to more traffic — often within five years, said Susan Handy, a UC Davis professor and the director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation .
Handy and other critics said that while Caltrans had proposed the lanes for high-occupancy vehicles and toll-payers, the additional lanes would still lead to a phenomenon called induced demand.
When more capacity is added to a road, “the immediate effect is an increase in speeds,” Handy said, and the faster-flowing conditions encourage more people to use the freeway. “So that increase in speeds is a very short-term effect. ... If the problem they’re trying to solve is congestion, this is not the right project to solve that problem.”
As researchers wrote in a 2011 article in the American Economic Review, there is a “fundamental law of highway congestion: People drive more when the stock of roads in their city increases .”
The additional vehicles, Handy said, will lead to higher emissions.
Caltrans itself flip-flopped on whether emissions would be better or worse : Both grant applications say in multiple sections that the extra lanes will decrease emissions, and also that the extra lanes will increase emissions.
The Caltrans whistleblower, Jeanie Ward-Waller, echoed Handy’s criticism of the environmental impacts but went further. She told the Los Angeles Times last fall that District 3 had improperly classified I-80 pavement rehabilitation as a maintenance project even though the agency’s intention was to begin widening the freeway for the Yolo 80 project. She said calling this a “maintenance” project allowed District 3 to bypass environmental reviews that would have been required to widen a freeway.
Winning Caltrans grant changed semantics
Caltrans did not respond to the six questions The Bee asked about this story last week, including one question about the pavement rehabilitation and another about Ward-Waller’s complaint. But the grant applications confirm two of the whistleblower’s claims: that the pavement rehab was a widening project, and that it was viewed internally as the start of the managed lanes project.
“To assist the development of the (managed lanes) project, Caltrans District 3 has secured funding for a pavement project rehabilitation that overlaps with the same boundaries as this project,” the agency wrote to the commission in 2022. “Work from this (pavement) project will be leveraged to assist with the construction of the managed lanes.”
A third grant application submitted to the federal government in 2021 was more explicit in saying that the pavement rehabilitation project aimed to widen the freeway:
“Work leveraged from the pavement rehabilitation project includes utilizing the widening and re-pavement of the roadway to accommodate the HOV lanes. This includes the widening of the Yolo Causeway to the inside median. The widening and re-pavement through the pavement project would reduce the cost and schedule of the (managed lanes) project.”
Caltrans said online that the pavement rehab cost $280 million .
Caltrans’ winning and losing grant applications differ in emphasis. Although the commission awards Trade Corridor Enhancement Program grants to projects that improve the movement of freight through California, the losing application did not always center how the new lanes might affect the movement of goods. The winning application rejiggers sections and sometimes simply reorganizes paragraphs or sentences to frontload freight.
For example, in 2022, a short subsection begins with a discussion of ramp metering and says close to the end that “I-80 no longer provides a reliable connection for freight companies and the public between the Sacramento area and the Bay Area due to the recurring congestion.” In 2024, the same subsection instead begins with an almost identical sentence: “I-80 no longer provides a reliable connection for freight movement or the public between the Sacramento area and the Bay Area due to recurring congestion.”
Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (INFRA) Grant Program application
Freight takes backseat to commuter benefits
The California Transportation Commission did not respond to The Bee’s request for comment, but its staff explained the 2022-23 Trade Corridor Enhancement Program selection process in its written recommendations for the commission’s June 2023 meeting, when Caltrans District 3 lost its first bid.
“Projects not recommended for funding were found less competitive for a variety of reasons ,” staff wrote, “including goods movement benefits were unclear or minimal; required information was missing or unclear; components were deemed ineligible; and overall lower ratings in the evaluated criteria.”
In both proposals to the commission, Caltrans argued that by adding managed lanes in each direction on this stretch of I-80, the agency would reduce congestion in other lanes, improving the movement of goods by allowing trucks to move faster through it. In 2049, the district estimated that trucks would be traveling between 5 mph and 9 mph faster during rush hour than they otherwise would because of the new lanes.
Currently, 12,000 freight trucks pass through the corridor each day, and Caltrans thought that with the extra lanes, 15,100 could travel on the stretch of roadway by 2049. Without a widened freeway, District 3 wrote, 800 fewer trucks would drive through.
Adding lanes, Caltrans said, would “improve goods movement along a critical freight corridor.”
In the commissioners’ discussion of the project in May , however, little attention was paid to freight.
Many of the commissioners’ comments and questions revolved around the project’s impact on commuters or jobs. Former chair Hilary Norton , who briefly touched on electric trucks not getting stuck in traffic, said the project aligned with her vision of “making this state a better place for young people.” Commissioner Clarissa Reyes Falcon , who did not mention the movement of goods in her comment, praised the idea of added lanes for reducing traffic, which would “ensure that folks have time with their families.”
Although many members of the public spoke that day to make the case against widening the freeway, the commissioners voted unanimously to move forward with the grant allocation.
A controversial I-80 project had a growing price tag
Handy, the UC Davis professor who specializes in transportation, said that the amount of time it would take for congestion to return to pre-construction levels is “hard to predict. But the studies that have been done suggest that within four or five years, you’re back to where you were.”
Construction began on the pavement project last summer, and Caltrans estimates the Yolo 80 Corridor Improvements Project could take three years. If the schedule holds, that stretch of I-80 could be under construction for four years.
In its winter 2022 documents, District 3 said the total cost of the project was $387 million. By the spring of 2024, the total cost had risen 20% to almost half a billion — $465 million — for 34 miles of managed lanes. Tables in each application show the change is mostly explained by higher construction costs.
The $105 million Trade Corridor Enhancement Program grant is just for “Phase 1” — one new managed lane in each direction for the 8½ miles between Richards Boulevard and the I-80/Highway 50 split. The full cost of that first phase stayed at or just over $200 million between the two grant cycles.
In addition to the upfront price tag, the project will require significant ongoing investments of public funds.
The federal grant application said the expansion would cost $1 million annually to maintain.
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