Arvada staff seek council input on funding, prioritization and advocacy for 20-year Transportation Systems Plan

City of Arvada staff and consultants reviewed a draft Transportation Systems Plan implementation strategy during a study session, asking the City Council for feedback on recommended funding allocations, prioritization metrics and how councilmembers can advocate for multi-jurisdictional projects.

The presentation, led by project manager Mike Griffith, summarized a 20-year TSP that prioritizes projects by measurable goals such as safety, implementability and public input. Griffith said the plan proposes seeding preliminary work from a designated TSP implementation bucket and recommended an annual seed fund to position projects for grants. "We end up with a $638,000 annual fund for seeding future TSP projects," Griffith told the council, adding that the seed funding is intended to support early phases such as scoping and preliminary design so projects can be competitive for federal, state and local grants.

Why it matters: the plan identifies roughly $1.8 billion in total project costs across lead, partner and advocate roles and aims to move many projects to a state where they are eligible for outside funding. Councilmembers pressed staff for line‑item detail about which existing CIP accounts would be shifted and asked for clarity on the tradeoffs between maintenance-oriented spending (for example, pavement repairs) and funding TSP planning work.

Staff described the prioritization framework as a weighted scoring…