TRANSPORTATION FUNDING CRISIS

by Dennis Rooker, Chairman Albemarle County Board of Supervisors
published in the Spring 2005 issue of the Charlottesville Chamber Quarterly Report, http://www.cvillechamber.org

The Charlottesville Albemarle area is experiencing a crisis in transportation funding that will have a severe impact on our quality of life if it is not addressed soon. Traditionally, the State has funded almost all local transportation projects, principally from gas tax and sales tax revenues and federal allocations. A combination of construction and maintenance inflation and stagnant revenues has drastically reduced State funding for new and even ongoing construction projects. Costs for projects have increased almost 100% in the last two to three years, according to Bill Cutler, a preliminary engineering manager for VDOT. This year, only about 29% of the State transportation budget will go toward construction, with 46% spent on maintenance and the rest on debt service and administration. If present trends continue, in 2015 there will be almost no funds available for new projects.

Our area is in the Culpeper Transportation District, which faced budget cuts of $125 million last year. In 2000, Albemarle County’s primary road allocation was $8,500,000, and its secondary road allocation was $4,900,000. This year those allocations are $2,250,000 and $3,700,000, respectively. Twenty-five percent of our secondary road allocation is required by law to be spent on unpaved road projects, which leaves the County with $2,775,000 for all paved secondary road projects. We don’t spend that money each year; we allocate it to projects until the necessary funds have been accrued to construct a project.

Let’s take a look at the Meadow Creek Parkway (MCP), a project which most of us agree is important to our local transportation network. The MCP is a secondary road project, not qualified for primary road allocations. The County has allocated more than $16,000,000 of its secondary road funds to the MCP over a period of twenty years. In 2000, the County section of the MCP was estimated to cost $10,300,000. This year it is estimated to cost $19,400,000. The County has to allocate most of its secondary funds to the MCP each year just to deal with the project’s inflation factor. The MCP is only one of more than fifty projects on the County’s secondary road project list. Charlottesville’s funding history for its section of the MCP has been almost identical.  

FINDING SOLUTIONS

VDOT traffic modeling for our area indicates that many of our roads already operate at volume/capacity ratios in excess of 1/1, a situation that will rapidly deteriorate over time without improvements to our transportation system. The City, County and VDOT, working through the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), have adopted a long- range transportation plan which identifies more than thirty road, transit, pedestrian and bicycle projects which need to be completed in that time period to avoid this deterioration. From that long-range plan list, the MPO has recently identified the following projects as being especially important to our area: (1) the Hillsdale Drive Connector; (2) the Meadow Creek Parkway, including an interchange at McIntire Road; (3) expansion of regional transit and transit corridor improvements; (4) completion of the Southern Parkway (between Avon and Firth Streets); (5) additional park and ride lots; (6) improvements on Rt. 29, including additional lanes from Hydraulic Road to the Rt. 250 Bypass and an additional ramp lane at Best Buy; (6) an Eastern Connector (between either Rt. 29 or Rio Road and Rt. 20); and (7) a connector road between Sunset Avenue and Fontaine Avenue (collectively, the “Identified Projects”). The Identified Projects have each been the subject of numerous planning efforts over the years, are each considered highly significant to a successful regional transportation system, and are unlikely to be constructed within the next twenty years under the current funding scenario. In order to move these projects forward, we will need to find or commit to other, perhaps nontraditional, funding sources. The combined current cost of the Identified Projects is more than $100 million. We need to tap into the creative resources of our community and work together to find and implement solutions to this problem.

For this purpose, the MPO has recently appointed a transportation funding committee, which includes members from the City, the County, 5C’s, the Chamber of Commerce, the League of Women Voters, the Piedmont Environmental Council, the Charlottesville Albemarle Association of Realtors, UVA, UVA Real Estate Foundation, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and City and County neighborhoods. The funding committee has met several times and will continue to meet through April to explore all possible ways for funding each of the Identified Projects. It will complete its work by providing a report with its recommendations to the MPO, the City, and the County. To deal with the problem of project inflation, the committee will need to include suggestions for creating the means for bonds to be issued and funded, so that projects can be started sooner, rather than later when the costs have accelerated.

The funding committee has met with our local Commonwealth Transportation Board member, Butch Davies. Mr. Davies stressed to the committee the funding crisis, but also pointed out that the State wants to leverage its dwindling transportation resources and will find ways to fund projects that have substantial private or local funding components. In light of these circumstances, we must be prepared, as a community, to consider for the first time committing significant local resources to transportation.

Transportation funding appears to be part of a continuing trend by the State to relegate responsibilities to localities without providing the localities with revenue sources to meet those responsibilities. Our community must find a way to meet this challenge, working with unity and creativity. Under the current funding arrangements, our area has not received from the State a fair proportion of the local gas and sales taxes collected in our area. At least if we fund projects out of local taxes, we will be assured that all of the money will be spent on local projects.