State has transportation wish list

If the federal government comes up with an economic stimulus package for the nation’s transportation infrastructure, Virginia will be ready to take advantage of it.

“We could put together $1 billion in stimulus projects,“ Reta R. Busher, the Virginia Department of Transportation’s chief financial officer, told the Commonwealth Transportation Board yesterday.

Assembling a list would be easy, officials said.

“It’s essentially all the projects taken out of the [state’s] six-year plan in the last year and a half,“ state Transportation Secretary Pierce R. Homer said. “It’s a list of old projects that have been canceled or delayed.“

That list of ready-to-go work could include the planned widening of state Route 10 in Chesterfield County, rebuilding 11 bridges on Interstate 95 in the Richmond region and improvements to Mechanicsville Turnpike in Hanover County that were chopped from the six-year transportation program, along with about two dozen other projects on primary roads around Virginia.

Dirt could be moving on highway, transit and rail projects within six months after a federal stimulus package went into effect, state officials said.

But absent a boost from the federal government, the transportation picture in Virginia will only get gloomier.

As state and federal revenues continue to slump, Virginia will have about $2.2 billion less to put into all its transport systems over the next six years, Busher said.

The reductions are almost certain to get deeper when Gov. Timothy M. Kaine presents his new budget in December, officials said.

Currently, construction funds for the current fiscal year alone will be 5 percent to 10 percent less than planned, Busher said. Virginia had hoped to spend $984 million on highway construction this year.

Cutbacks in road-construction funding will run as high as 45 percent between 2010 and 2014, she said, except for Virginia’s interstate-highway network. Interstates will see 5 percent to 10 percent decreases in construction spending.

Large metropolitan areas in Virginia are plagued by expensive, vexatious traffic congestion, while the state’s rural areas look to better roads and transportation systems as a vital underpinning to their economic development.

With nearly 58,000 miles of roads, Virginia has the third-largest state-maintained highway system in the country, behind Texas and North Carolina. VDOT’s budget this year is about $3.6 billion.

VDOT will have the proposed reductions in the six-year improvement program finalized by the Dec. 17 Transportation Board meeting.

The board is expected to hold public hearings and act on the proposals in January.

Peter Bacqué is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.