Jeffersonville, Indiana, gains TIGER grant for port improvements

The Port of Indiana - Jeffersonville received a $10-million federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant on Friday to complete truck-to-rail and rail-to-water improvements in the area.

Jeffersonville will use the TIGER grant to construct a multimodal facility and a railway extension that will link road, water and rail infrastructures at the Port of Indiana – Jeffersonville, located on the Ohio River directly across from Louisville, Kentucky. The goal of the project is to better meet the needs of future freight demands and raise freight mobility in the area.

“The awarding of this TIGER grant underscores the port’s goal of increasing maritime commerce through domestic barge service,” Maritime Administrator Paul ‘Chip’ Jaenichen said. “This is a critical project that will kick this Midwestern economic engine into high gear.”

The Jeffersonville project is part of 39 federally funded transportation projects spread throughout 34 states to be granted a total of $500 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s TIGER program. There were 627 eligible applications submitted from 50 states and multiple U.S. territories seeking funding from the TIGER program.

“Transportation is always about the future,” U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx said. “If we're just fixing today's problems, we'll fall further and further behind. We already know that a growing population and increasing freight traffic will require our system to do more. In this round of TIGER, we selected projects that focus on where the country’s transportation infrastructure needs to be in the future; ever safer, ever more innovative and ever more targeted to open the floodgates of opportunity across America.”