The Virginia Department of Transportation will give pink slips to nearly 700 of its workers this week, the final round of layoffs aimed at shrinking its payroll to 7,500 workers by midyear.
The staff reductions are the latest in a string of layoffs to help close a $4.6 billion dropoff in transportation revenues over the next six years. VDOT let go 500 full-time employees in the fall and has cut 450 hourly jobs.
The cuts that began Monday chiefly will affect employees in VDOT’s business support roles, as well as staff in maintenance and operations, and planning and investment. Of the 678 layoff notices, 86 are based in Northern Virginia, 30 are in the central office and the rest are spread throughout the state.
Receiving a notice does not necessarily mean a VDOT worker will leave the agency, spokesman Jeff Caldwell said. If the employee wishes to stay, the agency looks for anyone willing to retire in his stead. If nobody comes forward, VDOT looks to match that employee with a vacant position.
In the previous round of layoffs in November, the transportation agency issued 640 notices. Of those, 333 workers stayed with VDOT by substituting with other employees who offered to leave or by finding a new role within the department. Including those optional retirements, a total of 529 staff members ended up leaving the agency.
“We have strategically shifted our staffing structure to eliminate redundancies in administrative and business support functions while ensuring our emergency and incident response commitments can be met statewide,” VDOT Commissioner David Ekern said Monday. “VDOT will be a stronger, more focused, more efficient agency as we progress into the next decade.”
The collapse of transportation revenues has led Virginia’s highway planning panel to cull billions of dollars from planned road improvement projects and for VDOT to pull back on visible services, such as highway rest areas and roadside mowing.
