A redesigned two-mile extension of the Fairfax County Parkway through Fort Belvoir is not adequately funded, state and federal officials said Thursday, casting further doubt that the key road project will be completed ahead of a massive influx of military workers.
The parkway project, which would connect a missing piece of the road through the base’s Engineer Proving Ground, was designed before the Army announced its intentions to place 18,000 new workers on the 800-acre site. A needed expansion of the project to accommodate the workers has no identified timeline or funding source, however, Virginia Secretary of Transportation Pierce Homer told The Examiner.
Fort Belvoir is set to receive about 22,000 new military jobs by 2011 under the federal base closure and realignment orders, a plan widely expected to swamp the area’s transportation network. Of the hundreds of millions of necessary road upgrades in the area, officials have repeatedly pointed to the parkway extension as one of, if not the most crucial.
“The road has got to be completed,” said Rep. Tom Davis, R.-Va. at a hearing on the base realignment Thursday morning. “It’s got to be in A -1 order by opening day.”
The project is also bogged in ongoing environmental cleanup and a related disagreement over when the Army will be able to turn over the still-contaminated land to the commonwealth. The redesign could add new delays, as well.
“A substantially redesigned Fairfax County Parkway may not be deliverable by 2011,” Homer said.
The project, as it stands right now at mostly six lanes, has been touted as one of the only among the many needed projects to be fully funded. By conservative estimates, upgrades to the south county road system could cost at least $600 million.
Officials have frequently warned that the worker relocation will turn an already traffic-bogged system into a gridlocked nightmare, and at Thursday’s hearing stressed the urgency — and the potential infeasibility — of adequately upgrading the area’s roads in time.
