Virginia's Road Funding Crisis

The Virginia Department of Transportation is circulating a roads funding plan which would drastically cut the amount of transportation money available to Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William in the next six years.

Under a revised statewide plan for transportation spending, Fairfax County would receive $54 million over six years, down from an estimated $96 million. The $24 million Loudoun County expected would be cut to $10.5 million, and Prince William County's share would decrease to $20 million from $36 million. Transit funding would be cut 10 percent. - LoudounExtra

As a perspective on what only $10.5 million over six years from Richmond means, the Town of Leesburg's Capital Project's Fund (i.e., roads and the like) was over $28 million for 2008. That means that Richmond's contribution to Loudoun's roads in the next six years will be only 37% of what the Town of Leesburg spent in 2008 alone under the DOT plan.

"These reductions will seriously challenge our ability to jointly move projects forward," VDOT Commissioner David Ekern said in a letter to local officials across the state. "Localities will have to make difficult decisions as to which projects are advanced in the secondary and urban systems."
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Legislators are trying to come up with an alternative.

Meanwhile, high-priority projects that were to be built using transportation authority money have been removed from regional spending plans or delayed by years. For example, the widening of the Prince William Parkway and Route 1, designed for 2013, has been downgraded to an engineering study only. In Loudoun, the construction of the Route 7/Route 659 interchange has been pushed back five years. - LoudounExtra

Thanks to the collapse of the 2007 NTVA compromise, Richmond is failing to solve the transportation funding problems that plague northern Virginia, and in the face of an economic downturn, it is not likely a good solution will emerge before we have a new Governor.

In the meantime, if falls to localities to pick up the slack and fund their own fixes. Alternatively, we all continue to sit in traffic, using gas, polluting the air, and getting more frustrated every day.