Twenty local governments will get help with road, bridge and sidewalk projects thanks to a Hamilton County sales tax for transit.
Voters approved the 0.8% sales tax in May 2020 after a campaign predicated mostly on improving the region's Metro bus service. But to sweeten the deal, officials wrote the levy so that a quarter of receipts would go toward infrastructure — roads, bridges and sidewalks, for example — so long as they served public transit in some way.
"We have a county that had aging infrastructure, but we didn't have the money to do the fix-ups that were necessary," Hamilton County Commission President Alicia Reece said at a ceremony awarding the funds Tuesday. "So the voters had to make a choice."
RELATED: See the projects Metro awarded last year
That pot of money was $27.8 million last year. SORTA awarded the funds to 29 projects in 20 municipalities. Some of those awards include almost $5 million for improvements to Cincinnati's Gilbert Avenue, $2.5 million for improvements to roads in Lincoln Heights and $2 million for improvements to Northland Boulevard in Springdale.
The complete list of awarded projects can be found in this PDF on Metro's website. (The grant application was during 2023, and so the awards announced in 2024 are labeled as 2023 awards.)
Since the sales tax went into effect, SORTA says it has awarded $294 million in grants from the infrastructure funds. It will begin taking applications from municipalities this spring for the next round of funding.
You can find more information about the fund, including the board overseeing it, on Metro's website.