What was in the final VDOT audit?
We were told a lot of things over the years… by politicians, bureaucrats, and editorial writers that wouldn’t be found….
The key among them is a lot of money.
According to the Governor’s office, nearly $1.5 billion is either sitting unused in VDOT accounts or could be claimed from the federal government and put immediately to work on the state’s road network.
So how could this happen?
During his press conference, the Governor quipped that “money was sitting in accounts while people were sitting in traffic.” Arguably true, particularly if the monies were deliberately squirreled away during the Kaine years – perhaps to magnify the “transportation crisis” and increase the political pressure for a tax hike (and that was a strong, underlying theme during the presser).
But funding isn’t the only issue. Among the more troubling findings is a bureaucratic culture that embraced a “one-size-fits-all approach to project development and execution as a reason many projects are slow to develop” and a “procurement processes that take too long. Recent reviews by VDOT’s own inspector general were referenced, stating that it could take over one year to hire an engineer to design a project.”
VDOT approached even the most routine projects funded with state monies as if they were federal road projects that demanded more planning, more study and more delay. In other words, VDOT was managing the installation of turn lanes as if they were highway interchanges projects.
There’s a great deal in the report. But as it sets a firm marker that much of the money VDOT, local governments, transportation lobbyists, road contractors and others have said the agency needs has been there all along. It was a combination of politics, poor processes and bureaucratic inertia that prevented it from being put to work. Imagine that.
More to come.
