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Connaughton: State funds drying up for subdivision streets
Virginia Secretary of Transportation Sean Connaughton has a tough job. Faced with growing maintenance bills and no significant increases in funding, he has to keep Virginia's roads in good repair and also keep building new ones.Something somewhere has to give.
“It's becoming increasingly difficult for the state to maintain subdivision streets,” he said during a recent interview. “We have limited resources.”
The secretary has been taking that message around the state. Needless to say, it hasn't been received well.
Connaughton said local governments and community leaders don't want to hear that they're going to have to start taking care of subdivision roads themselves but the fact is that Virginia's maintenance budget is focused now on interstates and major highways. There just isn't enough left to keep up the back streets in planned communities.
He said the state is now moving $500 million each year from construction to operations and maintenance.
“We're transferring all this money and our maintenance levels are going down,” he said. “We're spending all this money and the roads are in worse condition.”
State officials are looking for ways to partner with local communities to get those subdivision roads built and maintained, he said, calling it “revenue-sharing taken to the next level.”
Getting the message through is an uphill battle though, because locals are so adverse to having to take on what has always been considered a state job.
But there's no choice at this point, he said. The money simply isn't there.
“Because of the limited funds, we're putting most of our construction money and most of our maintenance money into our interstates,” he said. “The reality is, we're simply not putting money into subdivisions, either to build or maintain them.”
And while he's got to deliver that news to reluctant ears, he understands as well as anyone the pain local leaders are feeling. Several short years ago, he was one of the locals railing against Richmond for putting too much of the transportation burden on localities.
Prince William
Connaughton got his current job in January when Republican Bob McDonnell was elected governor. Before that, he was head of the U.S. Maritime Administration -- a job he got from Pres. George W. Bush.
Before that, however, he was chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, a post he held from 2000 until he was appointed by Bush in 2006.
Connaughton isn't the first Prince William official to land a high-profile transportation job with the state. In 2003, Prince William Del. Jack Rollison (R-52nd) was appointed special assistant to the commissioner of VDOT. A few years later, Prince William's deputy county executive, Pierce Homer, was appointed deputy transportation secretary by Gov. Mark Warner (D).
Homer then got promoted to secretary, a position he kept throughout Gov. Tim Kaine's (D) administration before ceding the job to his old boss, Connaughton, when McDonnell took the Governor's Mansion in January.
And when Connaughton took over, one of the first people he hired was Dave Tyeryar, Prince William's budget director.
Tyeryar now serves as Connaughton's deputy and chief financial officer in the state transportation office. County officials said Tyeryar was picked because he's known for his ability to comb a budget for savings.
Why do so many Prince William officials land top jobs in transportation? Connaughton said it's because Prince William has a little of everything.
“When you're in local government in Prince William, you have involvement in every level of transportation,” he said.
Prince William is one of the few localities that has its own road-building program. It also has two interstates, rural gravel roads, a local bus service, regional buses, commuter rail and involvement in two airports.
“Prince William is known as a leader in transportation,” he said. “You can speak with credibility about some of these issues because you're actually doing them.”
The county has also been on the forefront of the push toward public-private partnerships in road-building and county officials have been very effective at using developer funds to get roads built.
All of those points give county leaders an edge when it comes to transportation planning -- and jobs.
Though he now works in Richmond, the secretary still lives in eastern Prince William, commuting back and forth to his new office. The drive isn't bad, he said, and in some ways, being secretary allows for a lot more free time than being chairman.
As chairman of the Prince William supervisors, Connaughton said he often had as many as 10 speaking engagements each weekend and would crisscross the county on Saturdays to shake hands at festivals or deliver thank-you speeches to volunteer groups. Now, he said, he mainly gets weekends off.
There's still a fair bit of travel though. Lately, he's been traveling the state, holding meetings about transportation plans and auditing VDOT programs.
The old way
The audits are necessary, Connaughton said, because VDOT's staff has been cut by 25 percent -- down to about 7,500 people -- over the last few years.
“We have to address the program because we have a whole lot less people,” he said. “How do we deliver satisfactory services with less?”
For the most part, that's a tough question but in his travels, Connaughton said a few easy fixes have jumped out at him. Most of those involve offices where staffers haven't kept up with technology.
“In Culpeper, they box up the plans and send them in for review,” he added, shaking his head. The documents are couriered across the state, given to an official for review, then passed to another official for another review.
The idea of emailing the documents to everyone all at once hasn't caught on yet because boxing them up was the way it had always been done, he said.
“A lot of the processes, documentation and procedures are essentially the way we used to do things before the information age really took off,” he said.
That's an ongoing issue he said he's noticed across the agencies.
DMV
Connaughton has also been hanging out at DMV offices around the state, sometimes just to see how things are running. Anyone who doesn't understand how different rural southwestern Virginia is from Northern Virginia should spend some time hanging out at the Tyson's Corner DMV.
That branch may have one of the most ethnically diverse customer bases in the country, he said, noting that the number of languages and variety of clothes at the Tyson's DMV are mind-boggling. It's caused some minor issues for DMV in the past because the organization has had to relax its rules to allow customers to bring their own translators, he said. While the state can provide translators for most languages, the Tyson's Corner branch gets customers who only speak, for example, an almost-dead Incan dialect out of Peru or a Hindu subset found only in a single village in India.
While not all previous secretaries have spent a lot of time out in the field, Connaughton said he's learning a lot that way and that people-watching in the Tyson's Corner DMV gave him a good lesson on the complexities of administering a huge department across an extremely diverse state. He also noted that DMV administrators have joked that they need a poster of him on the wall of every DMV branch so employees will recognize their boss if he drops in.
Potholes
The job isn't just about management, though. The new secretary has also had to get a quick education on everything from racist codes that are banned on license plates to pothole repair.
In his first few months as secretary, Connaughton -- and the rest of the state -- got hit by Snowpocalypse 2010 - the series of blizzards that played havoc on the state's transportation system and then left the roads dotted with potholes.
The secretary said legislators called him out to explain why VDOT keeps putting cheap patches on holes over and over again, rather than just put out extra money to do it well the first time.
Connaughton, who said he's had to learn about the finer points of pothole repair since taking the job, said the answer is that sometimes the roads weren't build well in the first place. If the original road was built on the cheap, the foundation under the pavement is making the pothole situation worse. In that case, the only way to correct the pothole permanently is to essentially rebuild the entire section of road from scratch.
If that's the only solution, “it's just cheaper to keep throwing on another layer,” he said.
He's also been asked to explain why VDOT repairs one road when a nearby road is in much worse shape. That, he said, is an issue that needs to be changed.
VDOT assesses the roads in September and October and draws up a repair schedule to begin in the spring, he said. That isn't working because “we're always a year behind.”
After snow and ice have done their part all winter, the road situation is significantly different in the spring when repair crews get ready to roll. A road that looked awful in October may look comparatively better come April than another road that is now in even worse shape.
“What was bad in the fall might not be as bad as what we find in the spring,” he said. “We've got to shorten the decision-making.”
'A great organization'
Despite some systematic issues, however, Connaughton said he's been very impressed with the individual people he's met on his travels to the state agencies.
When he came in, the secretary said he met a lot of employees working 12-hour days for weeks on end, traveling in from other parts of the state and living in hotels.
“It really was impressive. And they enjoyed it,” he said. “It's a great organization. There are some great people.”
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