Articles

Going It Alone

Frustrated with VDOT, Prince William County is financing its own massive road-building program. Critics are concerned that the money will not be well spent.

by Peter Galuszka

Like Frank Sinatra, Prince William County wants to do it, “My Way.”

The veteran crooner’s signature song aptly describes the transportation philosophy of the badly congested county in Northern Virginia. Frustrated by the state’s lack of highway construction funds and the federal government’s nit-picking regulations, Prince William has taken on the burden of raising funds and upgrading roads itself.

In the late 1990s, the county’s board of supervisors began authorizing county bond issues to raise money to widen stuffed highways and make other fixes. Today, the county has an ambitious 15-year plan to fix roads with up to $1.5 billion in current and future bond levies. “If we want to see any substantial improvements in the county, we have to do it ourselves,” says Sean T. Connaughton, a prominent Republican lawyer and former candidate for lieutenant governor who chairs the board of supervisors.

Prince Williams’ go-it-alone approach makes it more self-sufficient than any other municipality that depends upon the Virginia Department of Transportation to maintain its roads. According to Connaughton, self reliance has brought a measure of relief to Prince William, which is coping not only with its own rapid growth but the spillover from neighboring jurisdictions. “We have done in five years what it would take the federal government 15 years to do,” he says.

Prince William is a case study of a key precept of Virginia's transportation debate: the idea that transportation and land use planning should be aligned. The disjunction in planning -- land use at the local level, transportation at the state level -- often leads to growth and roads going in the wrong places, contends the Kaine administration and many other observers of the transportation scene. In theory, lodging responsibility for both land use and transportation planning at the same level of government should lead to better decisions.

It's up for debate whether that has happened in Prince William. No one disputes that the county has expanded its road network faster than state and federal funding ever could have. But environmentalists and smart-growth advocates see flaws in the county's approach. Prince William is spending most of its money on roads, and not enough on alternatives such as a county bus system. And it's reacting to growth, widening roads where congestion is a problem, rather than using its road-funding leverage to encourage more transportation-efficient patterns of development.

Kim Hosen, a county planning commissioner and head of the Prince William Conversation Alliance, goes a step further, accusing the county of taking funds earmarked in bond issues for specific improvements and spending them on unrelated road-building projects that open up rural areas of the county for development. “The county calls these ‘transportation’ bonds, but they are really ‘road construction,’ bonds,” she says.

Regardless of what the critics might say, Prince William is forging ahead with its aggressive road-building program. This November voters will consider a $308 million road bond, to be followed by a $400 or $500 million bond issue in 2014 and then an $800 million issue in 2018. Among projects earmarked for improvements are widening U.S. 1 to six lanes, widening Route 28 from four to six lanes and continuing work on Route 234, which connects Prince William with Loudoun County.

The county started its solo act in 1998. Supervisors were frustrated with the failure of VDOT to alleviate severe congestion along Linton Hall Road connecting Route 28 with U.S. 29, two major thoroughfares. The county held a referendum to issue $5 million in bonds to break the deadlock and raise the county's share of funds. But VDOT never ponied up the state's share, and the project was shelved.

Finally, this year, the county renewed the project by tapping the state Public Private Transportation Act. A new law set up the semi-public Virginia Resources Authority, which floats bonds for municipalities so they can have money for such projects as Linton Hall. Prince William is reported to be the first locality in the state to use this tool. The project should be completed within three years.

Linton Hall is one example of the county’s can-do attitude. “We’ve butted heads with the state fairly regularly and we’ve taken up roads that they’ve abandoned,” says Connaughton, an ex-Coast Guard and Naval Reserve officer who has been nominated by President George W. Bush to head the Maritime Administration. The federal government is no help, he adds, because, “when federal money is attached, it taints the project. They are very bureaucratic with their requirements.”

Connaughton believes that the county can do “$120 million of projects in five years.” It would take the state or the federal government 15 years to do the same. “No county is more aggressive than we are.”

There may little choice. “We’re so far behind the curve on congestion,” says Tom Blaser, acting transportation chief for the county. “We’re playing catch up. The counties to our south and west are growing so fast that our planning isn’t as relevant.” 

Planning, or the lack of it, is what concerns critics of the Prince William strategy. “They’ve been the one county in North Virginia with their own local investment,” says Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth in Washington. “It’s one way to address funding issues. However, we think that there is a very large disconnect between the projects they are funding and land use planning.” He claims that Prince Williams’ approach “does not effectively protect land resources.”

The county, he adds, has done some good work, notably road projects in Belmont Bay. But he has reservations. "Overall, we think the county has concentrated on larger highways and larger arterial roads to the detriment of local street networks.” Also, bypassing state and federal funding can mean bypassing certain environmental reviews that can raise important questions or identify alternatives.

"[It] is better to do projects only after traffic modeling,” Schwartz says. Under another new law, VDOT must review rezoning projects in high-growth counties like Prince William for their traffic impact. Even though the law doesn't formally go into effect until July 2007, VDOT is already wielding it aggressively. Last week, the agency strongly opposed changes in a comprehensive plan that would allow 28,000 new homes to be built in the Dulles South area of neighboring Loudoun County.

A larger question is why the county isn’t putting as much energy into better land use planning and alternative transport systems such as bus lines. The county, Schwartz notes, wants to merely widen crowded U.S. 1 rather than invest in transit connections that encourage more commuting.

Hosen echoes Schwartz’s concerns, especially the lack of interest in exploring alternatives to the one-man-one-car lifestyle. “Why not put some of the bond money into a county bus system?” she asks. “We are desperate for a bus system that functions.”

[Note: After publication of this article, Connaughton responded to Hosen's criticism, and then Schwartz and Hosen responded to Connaughton. Read the coments here.]

Hosen has other, deeper concerns. As a planning board member, she has studied the finances from the bond issues and has traced where the funds actually ended up. The money hasn't always gone where it was promised in the past, she says, and there's no assurance that it will in the future.

In 1998, the county held a bond issue to improve Linton Hall Road. But the county took "100 percent of the money" and used it to build Spriggs Road, which opened up land for development in a rural area, she says. She's tried to get explanations from the county attorney, she says, but he said his job is to advise the board of supervisors, not issue opinions. 

But transportation director Blaser says that “Kim doesn’t have her facts right.” In the 1998 referendum the city did raise raise $5 million that was to be used with $20 million from VDOT to start widening Linton Hall Road. “But that was back in the [Gov. Jim] Gilmore administration when the financial system was thrown asunder and the state didn’t have the $20 million.” Stymied in its original plan, the county applied the $5 million to cost overruns for the Spriggs Road project instead, Blaser says. However, the entire Linton Hall project now will be paid for through bonds raised by the Virginia Resources Authority.

For Prince William County residents who have been waiting seven years for the Linton Hall Road project, the improvements can’t come too soon. They endure not only hours of waiting in traffic every week but the noise from the road reportedly rivals rock concerts at Nissan Pavilion nearby. The plan includes installing sound wall buffers. That may make for more pleasant living.

But Prince William's brave individuality is still reactive -- playing catch-up to traffic patterns set in motion by developers -- and is doing little to re-shape transportation demand. While the county-funded road projects may alleviate traffic congestion temporarily, it is doing little to encourage motorists to modify their driving habits. The danger is that in 10 years, Prince William may find itself with more roads, deeper in debt and just as congested.

-- July 19, 2006

Connaughton response to Hosen: "The detractors are erroneous... We are expanding the county's bus system (now the fastest growing in the country); we have a transit lane planned on Route 1 and the Prince William Parkway; and our future bond referendum includes massive transit improvements."

To which, Schwartz and Hosen responded: