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Unified Planning Work Program (UPWP)
Overview
The Unified Planning Work Program (UPWP) is a description of the multi-modal transportation planning projects to be conducted in the Bismarck/Mandan MPO area in any specified two-year period. This biennial document is the foundation for requesting federal funds as well as a control tool for scheduling, budgeting and monitoring the transportation planning process.
The UPWP is developed with the input of the North Dakota Department of Transportation (NDDOT), Bis-Man Transit, and the jurisdictional partners of the MPO (Bismarck, Mandan, Lincoln, Burleigh County and Morton County). Also, public input from previous MPO studies is used to form the UPWP.
The UPWP serves as the MPO's budgeting action tool that takes the goals and projects from the active MPO Long Range Transportation Plan and formats the chosen projects into a budgeting action plan. The projects listed in the UPWP represent the selected projects that were developed from either a specific project description or a goal set forward in the LRTP.
The UPWP not only provides the MPO with a very useful budgeting, scheduling, and monitoring tool, but it acts to provide the public with an understandable expectation of what the MPO will endeavor to achieve within the next two years' timeframe.
Active UPWP
The 2023-2024 UPWP was approved by the Policy Board of the Bismarck-Mandan MPO on September 20, 2022. It became the active budget of the MPO January 1, 2023 and will remain in effect through December 31, 2024.
Occasionally, it becomes necessary to amend the two-year Unified Planning Work Program to accommodate expenditures that were not initially budgeted. All proposed amendments to the UPWP must be approved by the Policy Board of the Bismarck-Mandan Metropolitan Planning Organization. Once approved, amendments become part of the UPWP document. Alterations to the UPWP that do not rise to the level of an amendment (typically involving minor textual changes or cost adjustments less than 10% of the cumulative yearly budget amount) are presented as administrative modifications. Administrative modifications are presented to the MPO Policy Board for informational purposes but do not require any formal approval. Public notification is not required for an administrative modification.