CTB members James Rich (center) and Hollis Ellis (right).
by James A. Bacon
The Commonwealth Transportation Board awarded yesterday a $135 million contract to Skanska/Branch Highways for the design and construction of the Charlottesville Bypass. Board members voted without seeing a conceptual design, asking anything about cost-benefit trade-offs made by Skanska to submit the low bid, or knowing what changes may be required by a yet-to-be-completed Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
“We’re buying a pig in the poke here,” said James Rich, Culpeper District representative. “No one has seen the design. No one knows what it does. The environmental document is incomplete.”
Mark Peake
The board bought the logic of Lynchburg District representative Mark Peake, who argued that it was time to stop dilly dallying on a project that has been in the works for more than 20 years. “This has been studied. It’s been approved. … This is the plan. This is as good as we got. This is as good as it’s going to get.”
The outcome was never in doubt, as Rich has been the sole board member to express reservations about the controversial, 6.2-mile bypass. Other board members have deferred to the McDonnell administration, which has made the project one of its top transportation priorities.
The project was billed as costing an estimated $244 million in total engineering, design, construction and right-of-way acquisition costs when the CTB approved it last year. A Freedom of Information Act request by a Charlottesville activist group surfaced the fact that VDOT central-office engineers had identified major flaws in that estimate. By some in-house calculations, the actual cost could run almost double. VDOT subsequently made changes to the conceptual design, elevating one stretch of the road to avoid major excavation costs and simplifying the northern terminus. But the final design would be up to the winning bidder of the design-build contract.
VDOT has not released any information about how Skanska, which submitted the low bid for design and construction, proposes to contain costs. Outside of Skanska and VDOT, no one knows what features Skanska might have sacrificed to keep costs down, much less what impact those decisions might have on safety, speed or carrying capacity.
One element known to be omitted from the bid is landscaping. It is not clear how big that bill will be. Virginia Highway Commissioner Whirley said, “I heard a figure of $1.2 million.” But he also said the amount good go as high as $2.6 million. Another missing element is the cost of building sound barriers to protect schools and residential neighborhoods.
Arguing that “we can’t afford to throw money at a road to nowhere,” Rich proposed scrapping the project, keeping $80 million for Culpeper District projects and redistributing the rest to other districts. Although his motion was seconded for the purpose of advancing the discussion, no one else voted for his proposal. Later, Rich pushed an amendment to defer granting the contract until the Environmental Impact Statement was complete. The motion died for a lack of a second.
At one point during the session, Rich said, “This is a political project to satisfy people in the Lynchburg District.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton objected to that characterization. “This is not a political project. As someone who has lived in the commonwealth for 30 years and has been going down to Charlottesville to see relatives there, I’ve seen how traffic has gotten progressively worse and worse and worse. It’s been politics that has kept it from moving forward.”
