DALLAS -- Virginia has the environmental clearance to go ahead with a controversial road project whose flaws prompted tougher revisions to the state's public-private partnership law.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Friday that the state could proceed with a 16-mile expansion project on U.S. Route 260 in southeastern Virginia that was originally envisioned as a 55-mile, high-speed P3 toll road.
The environmental permit would allow construction through 35 acres of wetlands for the $425 million project. The road would be extended with the construction of 12 miles of four-lane divided highway and an existing four-mile, two-lane road segment would be widened to four lanes.
The benefits of the project will be ranked in January against other proposals as part of the state's new Smart Scale transportation project priority system. The Commonwealth Transportation Board will decide in mid-2017on whether to fund the Route 460 work, said Virginia Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne.
"Now that we know there is a permit that can be issued, we can see whether it makes sense for the state to build it," Layne said. "It doesn't mean it's going to be built."
Parts of the existing highway are prone to flooding in heavy rains, he said.
"I would think we would look at getting it to where it would at least be a dependable evacuation route," Layne said. "I'm not in favor of building the road or not building the road. I just want to bring it to a head one way or another."
Trip Pollard, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center said he was "deeply disappointed" that the Route 460 proposal received the environmental go-ahead.
"It went from a terrible project to just a bad project," said Pollard, who in 2013 asked the Federal Highway Administration to halt work on the planned toll road until an environmental permit was issued.
"I think this is a blemish on the environmental record of both the McAuliffe administration and the Corps of Engineers," he said. "It's been a project in search of justification. It has many of the same flaws, on a slightly smaller scale, as the previous proposal."
A settlement between Virginia and U.S. 460 Mobility Partners in July 2015 resulted in the company's payment of $46 million to the state of funds expended for the project as well as the cancellation of $103 million of company claims.
The Virginia Assembly in 2014 amended the state's 20-year-old public-private partnership law to avoid situations like the Route 460 fiasco.
The revised law requires that proposed P3 transportation projects be certified early in the process by a steering committee as being in the public interest before the state could sign a procurement agreement with the private investors. A steering committee determines if a proposed project should be financed as a P3 or by the state.
The administration of former Gov. Bob McDonnell awarded a contract to Route 460 Mobility Partners in late 2012 for the design and construction of a toll road that would parallel the existing Route 460 from Suffolk to Petersburg. The corporation issued $231.6 million of current interest bonds and $61.8 million of capital appreciation bonds to fund a portion of the project.
McDonnell said the new $1.4 billion road would provide greater access for truck traffic to the state's seaports and serve as a secondary hurricane evacuation route for the Hampton Roads area.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who was elected to succeed McDonnell in November 2013, suspended work on the toll road in March 2014. The project was cancelled in April 2015.
The project was halted after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the state was proceeding at its own risk without an environmental permit.
