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Transportation problems return to forefront
With the General Assembly session over and the county budget adopted, lawmakers are now turning their attention back to transportation.
State legislators will likely meet in a special session this summer to work on state funding for transportation. In the meantime, the Prince William Board of County Supervisors has its own road issues to deal with.
Last week, supervisors nixed a plan to increase car decal fees by $14. That fee hike would have raised $4 million for the county's Transportation and Roadway Improvement Program (TRIP). When supervisors opted to stick with the current $24 decal fee, they left a $4 million hole in the transportation budget.
“I think the state's idea of just passing the buck onto localities has reached the breaking point,” Board Chairman Corey Stewart (R) said on Monday. I don't see any of the localities picking up an increased share.”
Stewart said that 5 cents of every $1 in Prince William's real estate taxes goes to build roads. Building roads is the state's job, he said, and for years, the county has been taking on construction projects because the state won't do it. But when supervisors were asked last week to raise local fees to cover another state transportation shortfall, they balked.
“We're not going to increase taxes ... to do more of the state's job,” he said.
Nevertheless, the county's transportation budget had been built around the assumption that supervisors would increase the decal fee. Without that fee increase, supervisors will have to make some cuts.
Details won't be hammered out until next Tuesday, May 13, but a plan is already in the works, transportation director Tom Blaser said on Tuesday.
Essentially, he said, county budget shortfalls this year will affect two major areas of transportation.
The first major cutbacks, which were more or less decided months ago when budget projections came out, are the county's bond projects.
Most of the county's major road plans will stay on the books, although work will proceed at a slower pace than originally hoped, Blaser said.
Three major projects, however, have been cut; or at least, their funding has been eliminated.
Funding is gone for the planned expansion of Route 28 from Manassas to Nokesville. It's also been eliminated for the Prince William Parkway expansion and for the Minnieville Road expansion.
The county will still be finishing up improvements to other promised bond projects, including U.S. 15, Waterfall Road, Old Carolina Road and Linton Hall Road, but the timetable for some projects will be longer than expected.
The other transportation changes are the new cuts, which will be finalized next week and which will involve smaller neighborhood roads.
Under the TRIP program, each supervisor gets a designated fund for road improvements in his or her district. For instance, Gainesville Supervisor John Stirrup once used his TRIP money to make major repairs on the Bull Run Mountain roads.
While staffers haven't finalized their recommendation yet, Blaser said the TRIP program “is in jeopardy,” since the decal fee had been intended to fund that program.
There is still a faint glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel though. The General Assembly is expected to meet this summer to try again at finding a solution for transportation.
“We're optimistic that something will come out of there but history is not on our side,” Blaser said.
But if state legislators do vote to direct a new stream of transportation money at Northern Virginia, that may free up local funds for road projects that have been cut or delayed.
“I'm eternally hopeful,” Stewart said, though he added that “It's easy to become cynical when it comes to working with the state. They haven't done anything in the last 20 years with road construction.”
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