T2 Has a New Grant Manager

UFTI is pleased to welcome Matthew Muller, who joined us in early July to serve as a grant manager for the Transportation Technology Transfer Center (T2).

Muller will be working directly with several of the T2 grants, including the Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP), the Transportation Safety Center and the Florida Pedestrian and Bike Safety Resources Center. He will also be providing support to the Safe Routes to Schools program grant – a program conducted in conjunction with the UF Department of Urban and Regional Planning.

“I think that the grants at T2 have very tangible and meaningful outputs,” Muller said. “It’s a valuable service that they provide to the state and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

In addition to holding a master’s degree in urban planning from Florida State University, Muller holds a bachelors from UF.

“I really enjoyed my time at UF as an undergrad,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in opportunities to come back. I think that this position really plays into my strengths as a program manager and it directly relates to several aspects of transportation that I have interest in.”

Muller began working in the field as a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analyst in 2007 in the Florida Department of Community Affairs (which is now the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity). He worked on many projects, but the last big one was to help the agency move away from tracking  development project proposals via pen and paper to a database.

“[At the time] developers were proposing large scale housing and commercial projects,” he explained. “And the state at the time couldn’t provide solid reasoning for rejecting or accepting them because they had no way of knowing firmly how much development potential had already been approved and where.”

In 2010, he moved on to the Florida Department of Transportation’s Environmental Management Office, where he helped supervise computer programmers and database administrators who were working on the Environmental Screening Tool (EST) a geodatabase application used by the state to help expedite Project Development and Environment (PD&E) process..

The EST provides a single point of presence where all stakeholders have access to the same information at the same time for a singular and complete view of proposed transportation projects and any decisions, comments and issues identified by any participants. The EST also provides mechanisms to view, input and update projects and community characteristics information, perform standardized or customized analyses, generate detailed reports of comments by the agency representatives and offers read-only information to the public.

“The tool helps identify issues early on in the process,” Muller noted. “For example, it prevents situations like where developers are working on a road improvement for three years and then the Fish and Wildlife Commission come in and delay the project because it could potentially affect endangered wildlife.”

From there Muller moved to working as a Transit Planner for the City of Gainesville’s Regional Transit System. After a short three months, he was promoted to Chief Transit Planner. He was responsible for designing and planning the transit service for the City of Gainesville, Alachua County, Santa Fe College, and the University of Florida.  

The UFTI is pleased to have Matthew Muller as a staff member. Welcome to the team, Matt!