DALLAS – Local governments and regional organizations in Virginia have asked the state for more than $9 billion for transportation projects in fiscal 2018 when only $750 million is expected to be available under the most optimistic revenue projections.
"Our requests outpace what we think our resources are by more than a factor of 10," deputy secretary of transportation Nick Donohue told members of the Commonwealth Transportation Board on Wednesday.
It won't be known how much revenue will be on the table in fiscal 2018 until the final numbers are in later this year, Donohue said.
"We think it's going to be between $650 million and $750 million statewide, but, very candidly, we are not going to know what those numbers are until December when we get updated revenue estimates from the tax department," he said. "We have $2 billion more in requests than we had last year and we have $1.7 billion less to allocate."
Several of the funding requests sought more money for a single project than was available for the entire state, Donohue said.
"Some proposals included more than 30 projects in a single locality," he said.
The submissions will be scored and ranked by the Virginia Department of Transportation in a project-priority system known as Smart Scale mandated by a state law adopted in 2014.
Factors required to be considered in the ranking process include congestion relief, economic development, and environmental quality.
The increased number of submissions indicates that local governments are becoming familiar with the project ranking system used last year for the first time, Donohue said.
The rankings that will be released in December will be used by the CTB to decide in June 2017 which projects should be put onto the state's six-year transportation plan, Donohue said.
"The competition will be very stiff," he said. "Last year we had some extra funding thanks to the new federal highway law and some cancelled projects, but I don't see that happening this time."
Virginia will receive $5.4 billion of federal funding through fiscal 2020 from the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act, which was enacted in late 2015.
The available revenues will provide $325 million to $375 million for local projects and the same amount for statewide needs, Donohue said, with some projects qualifying for funding as both.
VaDOT revenues in 2017 are expected to include $1 billion of federal funding, $832 million from Virginia's sales tax on motor fuels, $878 million from the state sales tax on motor vehicles, and $784 million from VaDOT's share of the state retail sales tax.
VaDOT's $5.35 billion budget in fiscal 2017 includes $2.1 billion for road maintenance, $1.9 billion for construction, $496 million dedicated to projects in northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, and $352 million for debt service.
The board voted to rate a controversial upgrade of U.S. 460 at the request of Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne despite the qualms of some members that it was too expensive and unneeded.
Layne said it was important to rank the revised project, which was cancelled by Gov. Terry McAuliffe last year, to determine if it could be useful as a hurricane evacuation route for Hampton Roads.
"It does need to come to a conclusion," Layne said. "We should not fear scoring. If it scores well, then it's a project we ought to consider."
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers earlier this month gave environmental clearance for the amended project.
