Why Your Local Sponsors Struggle to Submit (And What You Can Do About It)

You put out the call for projects. The window opens, sits open for sixty days, and closes. Then you look at the submissions and see the same names you always see — the larger municipalities, the counties with dedicated planning staff, the agencies that have done this before. The smaller towns, the ones whose roads you know need work, didn’t submit anything.

This isn’t apathy. It’s a set of very specific, very solvable problems. Here’s what’s actually getting in the way.

1. They don’t know federal funding exists for projects like theirs

This sounds basic, but it’s real. A highway superintendent responsible for 80 miles of rural road and a staff of four is not reading the Federal Register. The concept that a local road rehabilitation project could be eligible for federal funds — and that their MPO or state DOT administers a process to access those funds — is not obvious to people outside the planning world.

It’s especially easy to overlook municipalities that aren’t active MPO members. MPO membership typically centers on the larger municipalities and counties in a region. Smaller towns within the planning boundary may have little to no ongoing engagement with the MPO, which means they’re not in the room when funding opportunities come up and not on the distribution list when solicitations go out. They’re eligible to participate — they just don’t know it.

Don’t assume that publishing a notice of funding availability is the same as communicating a funding opportunity. It isn’t.

2. They don’t know the opportunity is happening

Even sponsors who understand federal aid in the abstract may not know that your specific call for projects is open, when it closes, or that they’re eligible to participate. A notice on your website and an email to your standard distribution list will not reach everyone who should be in the room.

This is where outreach before the solicitation window matters more than anything you do after it opens. Phone calls to municipal clerks, conversations with selectboards, briefings at regional planning commission meetings — these are the things that produce first-time submitters. If you want a more competitive, representative pool of projects, you have to go find the sponsors who aren’t already in your pipeline. ProjectTracker supports annual and multi-cycle calls, which means you can build a consistent outreach rhythm rather than scrambling each time a new solicitation opens.

3. They can’t cover the local match — at least not yet

Federal aid requires a non-federal share, and for a small municipality operating on a tight annual budget, committing local funds to a project that won’t be obligated for two or three years is genuinely difficult. The local match might not exist yet. It might be in next year’s capital budget, or contingent on a bond authorization that hasn’t passed.

But the deeper issue is timing. Local governments operate on fixed budget cycles, and those cycles don’t always align with when MPOs choose to run their solicitations. An MPO that opens a call for projects after a municipality has already closed its annual budget has effectively locked that sponsor out — not because the project isn’t worthy, but because there’s no mechanism to commit match until the next budget cycle. By then, the window has closed.

The fix is to design your solicitation calendar with local budget cycles in mind, not just MPO convenience. Find out when the municipalities in your region typically adopt their budgets and work backward from there. A call that opens when sponsors have budget flexibility will produce a stronger, more representative pool than one timed around internal deadlines.

And regardless of when the solicitation opens, have the conversation early. Talk to potential sponsors about what the local share will likely be for a project of their type and size, and when they’ll need to have it committed. A sponsor who learns about the match requirement on the day the application is due is a sponsor who doesn’t submit.

4. They don’t have the staff capacity to prepare an application

A small town with one part-time administrator and no in-house engineer cannot produce the same application as a regional transit authority with a grants department. Expecting otherwise produces a biased pool — not because smaller sponsors have worse projects, but because they have fewer people to write about them.

Two things help here. First, keep the application as simple as it can possibly be while still collecting the data you need. Every question you add has a cost, and that cost is paid disproportionately by under-resourced sponsors. If a question isn’t directly tied to your evaluation criteria or your TIP data requirements, cut it. Second, offer technical assistance explicitly and early — not as a footnote in the application instructions, but as a proactive offer. A thirty-minute call with a planner from your office can be the difference between a submission and a no-show.

ProjectTracker’s submission interface is designed to be navigable by someone who doesn’t do this every day. Required field validation and plain-language prompts reduce the back-and-forth that consumes staff time on both sides of the process. When the form itself is clear, sponsors spend less time confused and more time describing their actual project.

The sponsors who struggle to submit are often the ones representing the most underserved communities and the most deteriorated infrastructure. They’re not absent from the process because their needs are smaller — they’re absent because the process wasn’t designed with them in mind.

Fix the outreach. Simplify the form. Make the call early. The applications will follow.