Articles

When Good Highways Go Bad

There was a justification for Route 288 -- a decade ago. Today, Richmond's newest highway stands as a monument to bureaucratic inertia and the power of special interests. 

By Bob Burke

RICHMOND--At the ribbon-cutting ceremony last fall for the new stretch of Route 288, then-Secretary of Transportation Whitt Clement was on hand to celebrate. It was a big accomplishment: the new four-lane freeway completed a long-planned western bypass around Richmond and added a new bridge over the James River.

But the project also marked “the end of a chapter in Virginia’s transportation system,” Clement lamented. “Without more state revenues, year in and year out,” he said, “there will be no more Route 288s, anywhere.”

VTrans2025, the Warner administration’s guiding transportation document, indicated that the state’s transportation system was so woefully under-funded that annual revenues, on average, would fall a mind-boggling $5.4 billion short of projected needs. Without a new source of funds, the state lacked the means to build a project of the size and scope of the $450 million Route 288... ever again.

To which the road’s critics would respond: Let’s hope so. Route 288, they say, is a textbook case of what’s wrong with Virginia’s transportation system. The handsome, limited-access highway received funding priority 10 years ago as an inducement to bring a Motorola microchip plant to Virginia. When Motorola backed out a few years later, the original economic development justification for the project ceased to exist. But the road took on a life of its own as a local governments and the business lobby continued pushing for it.

Today, Route 288 handles roughly 50 percent to 80 percent of its 62,000-vehicle-a-day capacity, providing some relief for traffic congestion on other roads in Chesterfield County, primarily the Powhite Parkway. But the project soaked up every dollar slated for primary road construction in the Richmond region, leaving a $129 million project deficit until the General Assembly paid it off with surplus General Fund revenues during the 2005 session.

Now the freeway is acting as a stimulant to suburban sprawl, luring scattered development to the western reaches of Chesterfield County and neighboring Powhatan County, raising fears that congestion could get worse. Says Gary Johnson, professor emeritus of urban planning at Virginia Commonwealth University: “It was built for a lot of reasons that in my opinion have nothing to do with good planning.”

Those objections may be old news, but they bear repeating this fall as a state Senate study commission explores ways to bridge the transportation funding gap. At the same time, the issue of trust has surfaced in the gubernatorial campaign. Tim Kaine, Democratic candidate for governor, has said he would not endorse any tax increase for transportation without a guarantee that the General Assembly wouldn’t raid transportation funds to fund other programs. But there’s an even larger issue, skeptics say: Can politicians be trusted to spend the money wisely, or will they blow it on more ill-conceived projects like Route 288?

Here’s a quick history of the project: In the late 1980s, rural Goochland County west of Richmond made a grab for a share of the region’s economic growth by approving plans for the massive West Creek business park right at its eastern boundary with wealthy Henrico County, an inner suburb with a population 15 times larger.

As part of the deal, the project’s developer offered free right-of-way if the state’s Commonwealth Transportation Board agreed to move the long-planned 288 corridor a few miles west to West Creek. The board approved the change, saying the new western corridor would cost less and require fewer houses to be torn down. However, the move gave the planned “beltway” around the city the configuration of a broken plate, because the north end of the proposed 288 would no longer connect with the existing Interstate 295.

Not much happened until 1995, when Motorola announced plans to build a $3 billion computer chip plant in West Creek that could employ up to 5,000 people. The high-tech Motorola project was the crown jewel of then-governor George Allen’s economic development efforts, and Allen quickly became an advocate for Route 288.

“The Motorola thing was just an absolute godsend,” says Steve Baril, a Williams Mullen attorney who helped organize support for the highway with the Chesterfield Business Council. “Once that was announced, we said, ‘[Motorola] is our ticket to ride. We’ll never get this completed unless we hitch our wagon to that star.’”

Baril says winning support for the highway from other counties took some deal making. At the time Henrico County was pushing for construction of the Interstate 895, known now as the Pocahontas Parkway, southeast of the city. “I was involved in brokering the deal, that Chesterfield would not say anything unsupportive of 895 if Henrico would not criticize 288. Because both jurisdictions had a very selfish interest,” he says.

As it turned out, both highways got built but the Motorola plant didn’t. The $324 million Pocahontas Parkway, a toll road that opened in 2002 using just $27 million in public funds, ran into trouble when its toll revenues fell far short of predictions. But out at West Creek, credit card giant Capital One took Motorola’s place, Baril points out. “Most experts would agree that Capital One would not have moved to West Creek without the planned completion of 288.”

The difference between Capital One and Motorola is this: Motorola would have become a new corporate citizen, while Capital One already employed thousands of Richmond-area employees before Route 288 was completed. By consolidating scattered operations that already existed in the region, Capital One's investment in West Creek left vacant buildings in established office parks.

Supporters of the freeway far outnumber its critics, Baril contends. “It’s easy to criticize anything after the fact. But the reality is that at the time… there wasn’t one single voice of opposition to 288.” The new crossing over the James River was essential to moving people in the western counties, he says. Regional business leaders “call it the most important project of the Richmond area. I would say that is high praise.”

In 1995, a private partnership pitched the Virginia Department of Transportation with the idea of financing and building Route 288 as a toll road. But that idea faced some opposition from local officials and soon died. Patrick McSweeney, a Powhatan County resident and former chairman of the state GOP, thinks the toll proposal never would have worked because the projected traffic count wasn’t high enough to support bond financing. Indeed, given competing demands of other transportation projects in the region, Route 288 never would have been built had it not been pushed through as an "economic development" project by Baril and others.

McSweeney thinks the defeat of transportation referenda in 2002 in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, despite polls showing high frustration, showed that voters suspect that some projects touted as congestion relief are really more about private-sector profits. “They try to sell it as a way to create a more mobile community,” he says. But “there’s ordinarily somebody at the end of the road who benefits.”

That’s clearly the case with Route 288. C.B. Robertson III, the developer of West Creek, was the most immediate beneficiary, although he later sold the property to Richmond business tycoon William H. Goodwin. As it happens Robertson takes a keen interest in state and local politics: According to the Virginia Public Access Project, Robertson has donated $56,000 to Virginia campaigns since 1996, exclusively to Republican candidates.

Another beneficiary was state Sen. John Watkins, R-Chesterfield, a nursery operator who owned large parcels of land along 288. Since the road opened, Watkins and four partners have has proposed building a 640-acre, mixed-use development complex at the intersection of Route 288 and U.S. 60.

The Watkins project is just the fringe of the development hurricane. Route 288 has triggered a wave of new housing and shopping-center development on Chesterfield’s suburban frontier.

The new Route 288 “has opened up an enormous new area to development,” says Tripp Pollard, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center and author of a 2003 study on the region’s growth. “It’s going to spur sprawl and will ultimately get more congested,” he predicts. "It’s just a classic pattern repeating itself.”

Echoing Pollard's warning is former Gov. Gerald Baliles, who a decade ago helped build support for the new highway. Local officials “should be careful of how they make land-use decisions,” he says. “Otherwise in a generation, 288 could look like Midlothian Turnpike or Broad Street. And to me that would defeat the purpose of building the road.”

Expecting that restraint, though, is a bit unreasonable. New highways open the door to the real estate investments that help county supervisors avoid raising taxes. “It’s asking a lot of any given local official to say, ‘I have to think about my region first,’” says Gerald McCarthy, executive director of the Virginia Environmental Endowment and the Richmond region’s representative on the CTB.

McCarthy credits Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia for creating region-wide transportation plans that are more than just a wish list of projects. “Richmond’s still on a learning curve,” he says.

VCU’s Johnson goes farther. The Richmond area planning district commission, which helps prepare the regional transportation plan, “is really impotent,” he says.   Localities make land-use decisions without thinking of the regional impact, he says. Goochland has used large-lot zoning to discourage residential growth near the West Creek site even though that means thousands will have to commute long distances on Route 288 to what is destined to be a major employment center – creating the very congestion that it’s supposed to solve. “All the power resides with the localities,” Johnson says, “and they do horse-trading to get what they want and transportation decisions suffer as a result.”

One of the key recommendations of the state’s recent VTrans 2025 report is to link land use planning and transportation, and there have been small steps in that direction. The Virginia Department of Transportation has conducted a couple of pilot studies with counties to show how land-use plans impact transportation, says Mary Lynn Tischer, director of the state’s Multimodal Transportation Planning Office.

But tying land use to transportation planning remains a prickly political issue. “This was one of the more controversial areas that the VTrans policy committee dealt with, because it was so difficult to figure out just how to do it and to get a consensus about how to do it, particularly in Virginia,” Tischer says.

McCarthy says VDOT is adopting a new prioritization process to “objectively evaluate” which roads belong on the state highway plan. There are five criteria: first is the efficient movement of people and goods, followed by safety, economic development, quality of life and preserving the existing transportation system.

The next version of the state’s six-year transportation plan ‘'for the first time ever will have new projects on it that are based on more objective criteria than we’ve ever seen before,” McCarthy says. “We definitely have a new way.”

But McSweeney and others remain skeptical. As long as developers benefit when roads are built near their land, as long as politicians have power to influence the transportation planning process, and as long as localities reap short-term advantage to their tax base from commercial development while the state picks up the tab for building the roads, the system will remain vulnerable to abuse.

Bacon's Rebellion News Service

September 12, 2005