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 August 12, 2005
 

 AP...Help coming for Florida traffic: State to get $8.6B portion of federal transportation bill

ORLANDO - Rosemary Chitty has lived here since the 1950s - before there was a Walt Disney World and Universal Studios, more than one shopping mall or even an interstate. Before the region suddenly skyrocketed to a top-tier tourist destination that draws 45 million people each year.

As a Lynx bus driver for eight of those years, she has seen firsthand the result of that popularity - a miserably overtaxed transportation system that has turned highways into parking lots across Central Florida.

"It's gotten progressively worse," she said. "These roads weren't built for all the people we have."

It won't instantly solve any of the state's problems, but Orlando is one of several cities around the state to benefit from its $8.6 billion share of the federal transportation package signed this week.

It includes $9 million for the Lynx bus program, which is expected to add another 30 buses to the 237 the system already has, improvements to an expressway interchange near the airport and two new lanes to alleviate traffic in a tourist district constantly jammed with visitors and commuters.

Perhaps the biggest project statewide is an Interstate 75 expansion from four lanes to six along an overburdened 25-mile stretch through Collier and Lee counties in southwest Florida, where some sections of road are handling 70,000 or more cars daily.

There's also $2 million to replace older buses in Lakeland, $3 million to help install a tunnel to connect the Port of Miami with two downtown highways, $6.6 million to better connect Jacksonville International Airport with Interstate 95 and $16.1 million to ease congestion between Interstate 10 and Tallahassee Regional Airport.

Nationwide, the federal government doled out $286.4 billion in a historic highway and mass-transit bill that took two years to hammer out. State officials say they're pleased the rest of the country has recognized Florida may be a nice place to visit now, but won't be soon without delicate plans to handle an exploding population that's made these roads some of the country's most congested and deadly.

The state got $920 million more than it expected, and saw its rate of return on federal taxes jump from 87 cents on the dollar to as much as 92 cents by 2008.

"We certainly did better," said Marsha Johnson, the Florida transportation department's head of financial development.

In Jacksonville, the federal money will fund a four-lane access road to the airport, a $20 million project intended to clear space for trucks coming from Georgia.

However, it could be a decade before ribbons are cut on many of the state's projects, and in the meantime drivers are getting by as best they can. In Orlando, for example, there is a culture of palpable regard for knowing where and when to go, and a broad willingness to use indirect roads just because they've got more green lights or less cars.

Some commuters have arrangements with employers to start work earlier or later, and some won't go anywhere during morning and afternoon rushes. Some roads, of course, are to be avoided at all times.

"I-4 and Lee Road, and I-4 and (State Road) 434," blurted Paul Cayward, a truck driver for an office-furniture company, when asked of the area's worst spots.

Still, Cayward said no matter how bad the traffic gets, he won't be driven away.

"This is where I work, where I make my home," he said.

Metropolitan Orlando more than doubled in population over the past 50 years, and today has more than 1.8 million residents.

On any given day the population increases by 100,000 tourists, and Orlando is the No. 1 car-rental market in the United States. An estimated 40,000 new cars pack onto the region's roads each year, and the population is expected to top 2.2 million by 2025.

Despite apocalyptic predictions, funding troubles have stifled several efforts over the decades to link central Florida with commuter trains and get more cars off of I-4, the region's core traffic artery. However, that could be changing.

This week, Orange County, the last remaining holdout of four counties trying to start a central Florida commuter rail, pledged to support its portion of a $473 million plan that could run trains from southern Volusia County to Orlando by 2009. Half of the project is covered by federal money, a quarter by the state. The other quarter is being covered by the four participating counties.

The rail would have about 12 stations on existing CSX Transportation tracks - one in Volusia County, four in Seminole, six in Orange and three in Osceola - and could transport 9,000 people daily in 20 years.

"Commuter rail serves people who live in central Florida and work basically in downtown Orlando. Not everybody can afford to live in downtown Orlando, especially at today's prices," said Bob O'Malley, spokesman for Metroplan Orlando, the area's regional transportation planning agency.

"You have a significant portion of our tourism work force, especially, that depends on transit. If they can't get to work, our tourism money shuts down," he said.

 

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  Tampa Tribune...Medicaid Payments Scrutinized

In some places, dead people vote. In Florida, they collect health benefits.

A federal audit to be released today raps Florida's Medicaid program for paying out an estimated $11.6 million for medical treatments that could not have been supplied because the beneficiaries were dead at the time.

The auditors, who discovered the discrepancy by cross- checking the payments against death records, concluded that the state ``did not have adequate payment controls for the prevention, identification and recovery of payments after a beneficiary's death.''

However, the sting of the audit is reduced by its age - it covers October 1998 through September 2001 - and the fact that Florida's Medicaid program, housed in the Agency for Health Care Administration, has gone through two changes of leadership since the audit was conducted.

AHCA's secretary, Alan Levine, has made the fight against waste and fraud the cornerstone of his administration. In fact, he's being sued by health- care companies for delaying payments for scrutiny because they seemed suspicious. He could not be reached Thursday. But AHCA spokeswoman Brandi Brown said the problems have been addressed since the agency learned of them in 2002.

Bob Sharpe, who was deputy director of Medicaid during the years that were audited, said the errors did not involve fraud. The overpayments involved prepaid health plan premiums for the month following the beneficiary's death, before the death showed up in state death records, he said.

The Inspector General for the Department of Health & Human Services, the office that conducted the federal audit, did not explain the long delay in its release. A spokesman for the inspector general referred questions to an HHS official in Atlanta, who said he knew nothing about the audit.

Medicaid, which covers the poor and disabled, is financed by states and the federal government. Brown said the auditors' estimate of the federal losses in the overpayments, $6.5 million, is being repaid through deductions in Medicaid payments to the state.

The federal auditors found more than 150,000 payments made for services to Medicaid beneficiaries after the patients were dead. Working with state officials in Tampa and Tallahassee, they pulled a random sample of 200 claims for further study.

They determined that 48 - almost one in four - were in fact inappropriate payments that totaled $15,765. The average overpayment was modest, only $328, but it amounted to $11.6 million when auditors extrapolated the error rate to the total of suspicious cases. That $11.6 million was in addition to overpayments that had already been identified by state auditors.

The errors ranged from $3 to $8,961, the audit said. It does not identify any of the health- care providers that may have received the overpayments.

This story can be found at: http://www.tampatrib.com/FloridaMetro/MGBC2I0V9CE.html

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